Friday, March 24, 2006

FONbasic Translations

Do you want to see FONbasic firmware in your language? Well, it's up to you!

Currently we have the full firmware translated into: English, Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Danish and Italian. The main reason is that we found people that kindly accepted to translate it into this languages.

We have partial translations in: Estonian, Czech and Polish. This ones only require the fon.txt file (shown below) to be translated.

What do you have to do?

Continue reading "FONbasic Translations"

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Thursday, March 23, 2006

Customer Service

Customer service is tough to get right. But I think we have done OK. We had issues with FON routers being back ordered. To be honest we didn't think things would grow as fast as they did. Almost all of the complaints we've seen have been related to people getting their routers late. Over the last two weeks we have dropped everything to make sure foneros received AND were happy with their routers.

What have we learned from the experience?
Shipping to Alaska is expensive! We mistakenly charged $8 to ship routers to Alaska. Actual cost was $29. We of course ate the cost and the customers in Alaska are now very big FON fans (we fixed that shipping problem).

USPS isn't all that great. We first started shipping with the United States Post Office. They aren't too good at actually getting packages to their destination. How did we solve this problem? We sent over night packages with UPS to foneros who fell victim to the USPS hickup.

Printing labels on old laser jets is a bad idea. We started printing our UPS labels on an old laser jet. During shipping some of the labels smudged and became unreadable! We worked with UPS to track down those packages and for packages that were taking a long time, we simply reshipped a replacement. We now used a neat little thermal printer.

It’s been a learning process, geeks doing logistics is a bad idea! We will be outsourcing logistics for the next batch of routers. But for many of those who received their routers late, they received more "FON stuff." See the pics below.

Hope we are doing ok.

VFSH0012.JPG

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Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Shipping updates

We are now shipping routers purchased in the first week of March. All routers prior to that have been shipped already and if you included your email address with your purchase you should have received a tracking confirmation. Thirty orders purchased in the month of February had delivery problems due to bad shipping address. So if you purchased your router before March and have not received a shipping number please contact us at delivery-us@fon.com

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Monday, March 13, 2006

Order status

If you haven't received a email confirming your shipment and you purchased your router more than one week ago please send an email to delivery-us@fon.com

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Thursday, March 9, 2006

FONbasic taking some steps. New languages ready for the next release

Hello everybody from the development bunker!

We are working on improving things on the FONbasic and FONadvanced firmwares. This is some of the features we have already implemented in the FONbasic firmware:
- Automatic channel selection: selects the most spare channel
- Improved firewalling: correct the WLAN isolation respect to WAN and LAN and permit the users to disable this isolation.
- All ssids will be forced to be FON_ prefixed
- New languages: Italian, Swedish, Danish, Czech.

We will be announcing more changes soon!

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Born Fonero

Foneros aren't made. They are born!

FONbaby.jpg
From sylvainbriant.com

Where are your fonero pics?

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The new WiFi

The first step in understanding what it means to be a fonero is to forget what you already know about Wi-Fi. This is not about laptops and cafes. This is about communication and access everywhere for nearly everything. Its about PSP's, digital cameras and magic lamps that are Wi-Fi enabled. Its about connecting neighborhoods to community LANs. It is about community! Foneros want Wi-Fi to be as ubiquitous as radio.

In NYC we have the FON Lab, it might eventually move to San Francisco. But in the FON Lab not only do we flash routers but we are testing the next generation of Wi-Fi routers and devices. The place is a horrible mess and we panic when we have visitors, but doesn't innovation start with chaos? ;-)

We love our foneros. Yes, we can be slow in responding to email. Yes, we have been slow in shipping routers. But we are always thinking of you and are working hard to keep you happy. Are you a fonero? Show us your colors and email me pictures! I want to know who you crazy people are! ejovi [ at ] fon . com

Posted by Ejovi on General
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