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Profile of Fon founder and his plans for future in the New York Times: The head Fonero, Martin Varsavsky, gets a write-up from a confab he put together and hosted at his vacation home on Menorca. Varsavsky is nothing but interesting, something I’ve heard from everyone who has met or had business dealings with him, and this article partly details his upstart challenge and the shifting focus at Fon. I’ve been saying for a long time that Fon locations may be numerous and require no coordination for their growth, but only locations convenient to frequent use would have a real impact, such as in retail locations. John Markoff notes that Fon has simplified its roaming model—non-Foneros pay, Foneros don’t—and that Varsavsky is now focused on bigger wins, like Fon’s Time-Warmer and BT deals. Markoff also gets the detail that Fon is losing €500,000 a month down from €1m per month. Varsavsky is interested in WiMax to supplement Wi-Fi, but I can’t see any model in which the frequencies useful for WiMax will be widely available enough for this kind of roaming system.
Creative drops Wi-Fi music player: The formerly leading portable music player firm, before Apple and Microsoft entered the biz, confirmed a report that the Zen Share existed, but that the company chose to drop that Wi-Fi-enabled player. An under-wraps player may appear in about two months that could include Wi-Fi—the name Zen X-Fi could be revealing or not, as X-Fi is an audio-processing technology.
Inspiair’s physics-defying technology sold, relabeled Max-Fi: I express my doubts about the combination of marketing promises, including area covered, low latency, and speed, and the collision of those promises with the laws of physics as well as regulatory issues. The lack of sales, noted in the article, tends to confirm my opinion, which is precisely what happened with Vivato after early positive response led to devices being built that couldn’t meet the mark. Current claims are 30 sq km with 14 access points for outdoor coverage at the port of Antwerp, a network that’s in a test. I wrote about Inspiair back in 2006.
Foster City, Calif., turns down MetroFi equipment offer: The city decided against paying $200,000 for MetroFi’s gear, which serves about 1,500 people a month, partly because yearly operations would top $125,000.
Posted by Glennf at May 27, 2008 1:17 PM
Categories: Wee-Fi
The statistics that Fon throws around are nothing if not misleading, and Fon will make no effort to correct journalists who get confused! Note: Martin has used similar figures as from the NYT article, but attributed them to *different* elements. See my blog for full details.
BTW - WiMax would only be used as the "backhaul" to provide Internet service to a Fon wifi router, which would continue to provide a conventional wifi-b/g/n hotspot. WiMax will not be implimented as a long-range wifi service, let alone one which could mesh. It is a station-to-client service, where only wealthy telcos can afford the stations, and all customers have client-only equipment. Alien Foneros will not be using WiMax cards to connect to Fon hotspots, but participating Bill/Linus Foneros will need to arrange for WiMax service with local ISPs.
Posted by: Austin TX at May 28, 2008 7:15 AM
Glenn,
Just to give some extra thougths: The Project in Antwerp was actualy 64 square km. This was a public tender were we competed with all the big players in the market. Nobody could do the job. We have all official cerficates testifying we are under 100mw. The client is happy and it works. Not convinced? We have a demo day in the Port of Antwerp on 19 of June. We will take a boot for more than 2 hours and you can come with your own laptop. At some points you will see you can surf on the web more than 1.5 km away from the closest antenna. So do we sign you up ? Be well, Avriel Rabenou (VP Business Development Max-Fi)
[Editor's note: Also, Antwerp is beyond my reach, but perhaps Esme Vos will stop by to test. As I noted in 2006, the 100 mW number is meaningless, because it's the effective output (EIRP) at the antenna and the sectorization that affects legality within regulation and defines range.--gf]
Posted by: Avriel Rabenou at May 28, 2008 2:47 AM
In December of 07 Fon lost 1.2 million euros. In April we lost 420K euros. In June we will lose around 350K euros, our losses are falling so rapidly because we are growing revenues and margins very fast and reducing costs. We have been able to reduce costs because alliances like www.btfon.com involve an outsourcing of some of our activities to the carriers we work with as connectivity takes place at their hubs and not our foneras.
Posted by: martin varsavsky at May 28, 2008 1:23 AM