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Former Mobivox founder Eric Reiher quietly launched TriBair back in January. The concept is rather simple. Marry up free calling with WiFi. Ok, nothing exactly new as Truphone and Gizmo both debuted that way years ago, and initially the news came at a time when I was too busy with CES to think about it more deeply. Then came my L-O-N-G, V-E-R-Y L-O-N-G trip that started in MIami at IT Expo and now has me in my fourth country in three weeks, and with a few more weeks of travel what Eric told me about is now gaining traction in my mind because I'm seeing how it works first hand in a limited manner from others via FON and their partners.
In the fast I've possibly unfairly dismissed FON, the hotspot network, but now some years later as the FON technology has found it's way into broadband providers networks in France and elsewhere as a way of sharing access as friends who go from house to house, and to others who don't even know one another, I've come to recognize the genius of the idea. And, with Tribair, so has Eric.
When you look at what Cablevision, Comcast and TimeWarner are doing with shared Wi-Fi access, their model provides their customers with the ability to "roam" from hotspot to hotspot, now public only, as if their customers are home. SFR/Neuf in France provides the same concept, but each customer of a NEUFBox, and I would suspect the same from Free.tv exists, can turn on their SFR WiFi Hotspot thus making their hotspot accessible to SFR mobile and 3G data subscribers, who have smartphone or WiFi laptops.
The idea is simple. You install a Tribair client, find a hotspot and make free calls to other TriBair subscribers or for low rates to others.. In alot of ways this is as much like what Skype Access does with Boingo, but for free. And if the FON model of sharing between carriers and between their customers can keep growing, then Tribair has more than a shot at being successful, especially in light of T-Mobile's statistics which shows how many of their customers use their mobiles to make calls over Wi-Fi.
One page out of the FON manual that Eric has taken is the friend's connectivity idea. You can add your own Wi-Fi hotspot to the list and that lets others make calls for free too. While initially something I didn't pay attention to, having now looked at the model from afar, I like what I'm seeing more and more with Tribair, so give it a TRI.
Andy, I don’t think your dismissal of Fon is unfair. I ceased writing in my blog, Elfonblog.fondoo.net over a year ago, due to years of disappointment with Fon’s progress, crazy games, and censorship of the Fon volunteer Community.
Fon is not a new or genius idea. Fon is a carbon copy of dozens of preexisting, nearly identical systems, based also on open-source software. This became quite clear to me once I entered the scene and started taking notes for Fon-ideas. See the sidebar of my blog for examples. Fon’s main distinction is that they blew €15M on re-badged, discontinued Accton routers that were given away, and discounts to encourage sales of their later merchandise. It’s a matter of breifly successful publicity, and nothing else.
This brings me to what is so ironic about your particular post today. Leading up to Fon’s official launch in 2006, Martin Varsavsky had been describing Fon in interviews as a movement, like TriBair, to blanket the world with a software application, which would provide ad-hoc wifi, via dedicated PCs, specifically for WiFi VOIP handsets. Sort of a poor-man’s femtocell featuring rock-bottom airtime rates. He stated their intention was to openly challenge monopolistic telcos everywhere. There was no interest in wifi for other purposes. But when they launched, they had somehow become a peddler of hardware, to provide for-pay hotspots, at their inflexibly fixed worldwide rate, with 66% or more of the funds collected taken by them for largely unexplained reasons.
The final straw was an email exchange between myself, Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky and Alex Puregger. They bounced me back and forth, Martin saying “we have no secrets” and “Alex will answer your questions” (about my rough analysis of Fon’s dreadful failure to sell routers, get the routers they sold registered, and to keep them online. All the while, they periodically announced that sales/membership/profit had leapt and bounded across yet another fantastic goal after goal. See my final blog posts and examine the pie graphs. The overwhelming majority of “The Fon Network” consists of the “partners”, even as Fon insists on counting their routers that are permanently offline, or never even registered!) Alex would then insist that he could not discuss these figures due to “confidentiality agreements” with Fon’s partners.
All of my data came from those partner’s own websites.
Martin would pointedly never address my questions, other than to delegate them to one he knew would not cooperate, but kept complaining that actually merely asking them was insulting (and perhaps disloyal!). Shortly afterwords, Martin directed a comment to his critics, in his own blog, along with pictures of himself and friends cruising the ocean on his yacht. He wrote that he didn’t care what people said any more, because he had achieved wealth and luxury, and it was good times like these which was all he cared about.
In my opinion, Fon has consistently LIED that Fon was a provider of “free wifi” and that they “split the money collected”. With only a few highly-conditional exceptions, wifi access is free only to those who purchase Fon’s merchandise. Fon actively hides the fact that they actually “split” only what is left over after taxes are taken out, and apparently other fees are paid to ISPs for their cooperation. I broke that down too, in another blog post. What is worrying is that in the USA, where there are no VAT taxes, Fon still confiscates about the same %33 up front, before “splitting” the remainder, for a total of two thirds or more. It suggests that they are pocketing it. Fon’s email response to me was to paste a snippet from their “legal team” that was supposed to explain why they feel they do not have to itemize these deductions from a hotspot’s revenue. I’m not trained in legalese, but it was very brief, and didn’t seem to have anything to do with the question. The customer service member (the teenage son of Fon’s “head USA Fonero”) also advised me that he had directed the whole CSR team to ignore my questions from then on!
I could write about so much more, and if you want to see some of the (admittedly unleashed) things I’ve written, another resource is the discontinued boards.fon.com **which they announced will be taken down soon**. Most of my posts are helping community members, and contributing to ideas, brainstorming and troubleshooting. I stubbornly resisted Fon’s first attempts to purge the board of independent thought. I was one of a very small core group left from the beginning. Fon was extremely slow to react to complaints about trolls that abused me for long periods of time, yet very quick to threaten me with banning for such reasons as “my comments did not appropriately balance criticism with praise”! My creative contributions were gradually overwhelmed with the effort to recount what Fon had originally claimed to be doing, and when and how they shifted in almost Orwellian manner. Many of their rationales to us hinged upon jaw-droppingly creative reinterpretation of terms they had used in past announcements. In my opinion, they were misleading the community from the very start.
If you don’t see any of my posts under “AustinTX”, then you may be looking instead at Fon’s “replacement” forum that was launched to restart community discussion under stronger, “praise us or shut up” rules. This forum would not let me register under any user name while connected through the small ISP I used at the time. It was too much trouble to go somewhere else to get a connection, and I was not allowed to blog or post at work. Using a Fon hotspot was out of the question too, because Austin is blanketed with dead hotspot locations, as one of my blog posts explores. I gave up posting out of simple disgust. I gave up blogging after that, because I don’t simply repost their product release announcements, and Fon was no longer doing anything of interest to the hobbyist.
Andy, I know i’ve written quite a volume here, and if it makes any difference, I’m also a long-time listener to your KenRadio show with Ken Rutkowski. It’s been nearly a year since i’ve written a word about Fon. My ties to them have never been anything beyond as a hobbyist contributor. I’d be very pleased if you would post my comments.