Boingo Update

Steve, thank you for that clarification. I will remain a Linus at home (and hope that someday I can find another Linus to beg from), and will remain a Bill at the Café. This seems perfectly reasonable! Hopefully, it will expand the network.

Meanwhile, I think I've recruited another two Foneros!

Steve, will Bills be able to access the Boingo Hotspots for free?

Boingo has 3 prices...
7,95/day for a US/Canadian hotspot
9,95/day for an international hotspot
21,95/day for 1 month on any boingo hotspot...

Currently only the bill owner where the daypass is bought...get's the money... the other bill hotspots this "alien" visits will get nothing.
What happens with the boingo customers who pay directly to boingo before visiting our fon hotspots?

Has it been considered that FON Linuses could get access to the whole Boingo network as an exchange for adding their own active Linus fonspot onto the Boingo roaming?

Cause I'd find it awesome to suddently get 60 thousand new hotspots as long as I let them onto my Linus fonspot..

How about detailing all the different partnerships that you are making on a page, so we can have a better idea of how crazy fast FON is growing thanks to roaming partnerships.

I especially find it amazing if you could get some firmware upgrades on all BT routers, I hope you get something concrete done with Neuf in France and I hope you can convince Free and Wanadoo to join in also even though they all hate each other in France. If you can be the Switzerland of Wi-Fi roaming systems, and if all this double SSID can be done by remote firmware upgrade with opt-out possibillity for each SIP customer, you would faster grow our FON network to the millions of hotspots that would all be compatible with a single username and password.

I imagine some more detailed customization that each Fonero would have access to, for example onto which roaming networks he wish to be added onto. For example Boingo might be a simple exchange for Linuses, but if there is some certain balance in favour of the one or the other, then why not add some Roaming fees, that could vary. But this is how I imagine it, the Fonero could add some credit on his FON account and tick the boxes for which he would be paying some small fee per GB when roaming for example on Free or Wanadoo's whole compatible network. If the account becomes empty, then the user needs to refill it with a little more credit to use more bandwidth on those roaming partners.

The idea is Wanadoo and Free might want to earn some money somehow before signing to upgrade the firmware of each of their million or 3 million of Wi-Fi routers deployed for example all over France. And in the same way, you would charge them to roam on your whole FON Bill network, and exchange+roaming for Linuses.

Also Foneros should get cheaper roaming fees if their FONspot is more or less active, in terms of amount of users discovering the hotspot, amount of users paying to connect, and the quality of the bandwidth that is served, thus also amount of GB served.

Credit earned by Bills could also be used to roam FON and all the other roaming partners. The important thing I hope you can do is that one username and password works on all with small automatic roaming fees if needed.

Wouldn't it make more sense to either allow Boingo's to connect to Linusess and keep all the proceeds for Fon, or to simply treat Linuses like Bills when the connectee is a boingo?

Lots of good suggestions and questions here. I'll come back around with more details for you. The most common question is; why can't a Linus roam the Boingo network for free? That would be great for FON but there would be no incentive for anyone to remain a Boingo customer, they would just become Foneros! Boingo is our partner so we have to work with them so it's beneficial to both of us. This agreement gives FON lots of exposure to wifi users, gives Bills another source of revenue, and gives Boingo more hotspots for their customers.

I'd say the Linus doesn't necessarilly get free Boingo roaming. Through a rechargeable credit the Linus should be able to roam on Boingo and the other roaming partners you will get.

Also you should find a good way to grade Linuses based on the quality of their FONspot. I dunno if you can count how many times the FONspot has been sniffed by a WiFi device, how many time someone has looked at the login page, of course you know how many people have connected and how many have paid. Also you monitor the bandwidth offered. Based on that, and giving an incentive to Linuses to get a FONtena, the roaming fee could be free for the best Foneros, or could be cheaper for an average Fonero and would be full roaming price for a Fonero who's Fonspot isn't very active.

Basically a Linus could leave his credit card info in his account settings and click a box that says "I want to roam on Boingo" and chooses that it may charge in 5€ increments that don't expire, and with a specific price per GB and/or price per hour or price per day automatic roaming charge.

Same system for roaming on Neuf, Wanadoo, Free, BT, DT, 1and1, Cybercity, CPH-Metronet and whichever lots of ISPs you can make firmware-upgrade or bundled Fonera and Fontena partnership deals with.

It's hard to overlook the reverse of Ross's point about incentive; Why would anyone pay Alien rates at $3/day when they can pay Boingo rates at as little as $.71/day? Also, since Bills actually make their Fon money by conducting sales to Aliens (not for providing time or bandwidth), will Bills now be able to conduct sales of Boingo service at their hotspots? Doesn't this dilute the Fon brand?

www.fon.com needs a "favicon.ico".

Boingo doesn't seem to have ANY hotspots of it's own... it just buys access to existing hotspot owners... So boingo can't allow fonero's to roam on THEIR (boingo) network because Boingo has no such hotspots to decide that type of access...