The Firehouse

On September 14th, FON launched the new version of their online mapping service, after several months of complaints from users that the service wasn’t up to scratch, and announcements stating the development team was working on the problem.

On a first look, the maps look really nice – they use Google Maps, by default in the mixed view, where you see a satellite image and an overlay of roads and placemarks. I will not bore you with the details, as it is better that you check them out yourself and make up your mind.

This post is not intended as a review of the service itself, but rather, a revelation of the real figures behind FON’s network – peeking under the layer of PR and flamboyance. Martin Varsavsky is always boasting about FON being the largest WiFi community of the world – in my view, this is not accurate.
During months, FON has been claiming to be a “movement”, with a marked communist image behind (the marching workers, the spray-painted logos, etc.). This movement was supposed to kill mobile operators, who currently oppress people with their sky-high tariffs. We could go into a long debate just on this topic, but lets move on. During all this time, FON has suffered untold problems with staffing, PR mini-scandals, shipping broken routers or taking weeks and months to even send them out, not replying to repeated requests to support@fon.com, and blatantly ignoring the public forums, where the community behind the movement was expressing its increasing anger and frustration.

The blinding truth – less than 3.700 routers online worldwide

Digging a bit deeper into the workings behind the maps, I have found that there is a method to run a query to retrieve all the hotspots in FON’s database, not just two hundred, or those in a particular region. If you want to see an example, click here. This is a query that will return all hotspots on the planet that have been FONing home during the last hour. It can take a little while to load, so be patient. Until a couple of days ago, results were returned in XML format, which has been dropped in favor of the new plain, comma-delimited format.

I predict that FON will not like the above link, and thus will try to either change the format of the php call, or add artificial records to confuse the application I have written to process the data. First, I wrote a simple application using RealBasic (having been a long-time Visual Basic acolyte, it is a welcome change, allowing me to code under Mac and Windows transparently) – source code here. A screenshot of a full run is shown below.

Just from the details shown after the run, a few enlightening facts surface:

• The highest user ID found is 92.192, but the total amount of processed records is only 55.384. I have to investigate a bit further, but it appears that in some cases, a record is stored twice, once holding the user type (Linus, Alien or Bill), and again holding the router mode (online or unknown). This is the reason why some people see both the orange dot and the green halo on their locations at maps.fon.com, and also the reason why at this time I cannot confirm that the real number of Foneros is 43.896.
• There are only 3.674 routers online on the entire planet. So much for the largest WiFi community in the world. The other 7.814 are registered routers, from which nothing has been heard during the last hour. These figures have been checked a few times during the last few days, and they stay more or less constant.
• Out of the entire user base, only 1.317 have become Bills. So much for milking one’s WiFi.
• The highest router ID found in the results was 19.889, so if we add offline and online routers (best case scenario), then around 8.401 routers have never been registered, representing 42.2% of sold routers. Extrapolating this to the 1 million routers Martin wants to sell would results in a loss of $10.55 million!.

Looking at the per-country statistics (per-city could be made, given some extra time and coding), some curious details also stand out:

• There are two registered routers in Afghanistan – but neither is online. Not surprising, considering the amount of explosives that have been dropped on the place.
• China and Taiwan have 9 routers registered, but none online. Martin was blogging about his expansion into Asia, which looks rather bleak right now. 165 Foneros are registered however.
• Germany and Spain have around the same number of registered routers, although Germany almost doubles Spain in the number of online routers.
• The United States ranks third in number of registered and online routers, however, it holds the highest number of Bills (408). The next is Germany, with 237.

Finally, we can derive a few figures from these numbers. These are highly interpreted, and must be taken as theoretical extremes.

• If FON sold one $3 one-day pass every day of the year on each of the online routers, it would make a gross income of $4 million. This is before tax and the Bill’s share where applicable. You at the back, stop giggling!
• Making a wild assumption that each router’s signal reaches 100 people, FON would only cover 0.11% of Germany’s population of 82 million.
• Boingo gives you access to 45.000 hotspots. FON has about 8% of that figure, and with location quality debatable – it is a fact most FON hotspots will not be optimized for even street-level coverage.

I believe it is time for FON to stop boasting about having the largest WiFi community in the world, and start concentrating on its real problems. And if they still don’t know what these are, they have a nice summary at the online forums. Besides, for spending 500.000 Euros per month, this is a pretty poor show, in my humble opinion.

Below you can find a few pie charts representing the statistics produced. You can download the original Excel sheet here (minus the graphs).

32% of routers online is not such a good show.

What really surprises me is that the UK is so far behind. This is a distribution of registered users, that is, those that once were online, but have never been heard of since.

No surprises there, other than as mentioned the difference in online/offline ratio between Germany and Spain.

Finally, it is evident that the Bill model has not motivated many users. Lies? Manipulation of the facts? Fantasy? You decide!

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft is being sued by a company named PalTalk, which has two patents on a “Server-group messaging system for interactive applications”, original patent filings here and here. If you read through the patents, it becomes evident that they cover a hugely broad number of messaging systems, wether delayed or in real time.

The patents date back to 1998 and 2001, and I remember vividly using IRC during my university years (it was born late August 1988), and mailing lists even before that. Heck, remember BBSs over 1200bps modems? Well, these people at PalTalk seem to have patented just that. IRC and mailing lists. And by default, all other chat platforms that have come ever since – MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google, to name a few big ones, but miriads of smaller, targeted server-based chat mechanisms. Voice you say? I was using voice to talk to simulated ATC (yes, people actually acting as ‘virtual’ air traffic controlers, way cool!) while flying on a simulated airline in Microsoft Flight Simulator eons ago, when 800×600 was a decent resolution to run your games at.

Can anyone say ‘prior art’ and ‘patent trolls’? Further info on BusinessWire’s PalTalk press release.

Two days ago, I posted a comment in reply to Martin Varsavsky’s post, Fabricar vs Crear, as the first comment asked Martin to look at a particular thread in FON’s forums. The comment was critical of the way things are going at FON, here is a translation of it:

Martin, I see that you are travelling a lot and promoting FON. But you should also listen a bit to the people who are the base of FON. In essence, the foneros.I was reading one of the forums and they [sic] changed my perception of the reality of FON.
The FON idea is brilliant but if seen from the outside, it appears to be a polished and shiny apple, but if we take a look inside, maybe it is rotten. Do you understand me?
I post a link from the forum.

http://foros.fon.com/viewtopic.php?t=2244

Read it and let me know your thoughts.
Greetings
Matias

If you click on said link, you are greeted by a “no such thread exists message”. Only moderators can delete entire threads, so is this a case of blatant censorship by FON? I somehow doubt Matias would have posted a link to a thread that didn’t exist, so I wrote a comment about this, also telling Martin that if he indeed picked up the fon [sic] to call someone to have the offending thread deleted, he should also check the rest of the forums and get rid of a lot more of them.

Surprise surprise, the comment was not approved, and a couple of comments have appeared during these couple of days, so mine has been censored. It did not contain foul language, offensive wording or anything that would cause rightful moderation on any respectful blog. I have to admit it was hard and to the point, critic with the censorship.

I will ask Martin again, this time on my own blog, which he cannot censor: if every one of your users, the very people building FON’s infrastructure for you (and paying for it!), one day get fed up with FON blatantly ignoring them, and decide to turn off all their routers, what will you do? The result of this collective action would be FON instantly dissapearing, zero coverage, zero revenue.

So, what will it be, coming down from the cloud and facing reality, or keeping on the “we are in beta, we are a small team, and we have problems but this is allowed because it is so-oh-web-two-dot-zero”, travelling around the world and making bold claims that later turn out to be hot air?

…you can tell who made your latte at Starbucks by feeling its weight – this morning I was handed one that felt so obviously light, it was one third froth. This has been happening for a couple of weeks, and always when a particular barista was at the wheel. The solution? Sip off the froth, top up with milk from one of those thermos conveniently placed at the accessories counter. I made it very obvious so she could see the action, let’s see what happens tomorrow.

What do you do when you need to embed WiFi into a project really quick? You look for OEM modules – one of the best manufacturers being Digi. They make, amongst other variations, the Wi-ME, a small box that has a RTOS chip (it can be made to run Linux apparently) and the WiFi adapter, with a serial interface and GPIOs that go to your application. In essence, you can bridge a serial port to a TCP or UDP port and stream data to the internet, all without messy wires!

After looking at the ordering page, I duly contacted the spanish distributor Matrix. I needed two modules by this last Monday, and so I requested to have the devices shipped by Friday last week. It all turned out into one big mess, with vague excuses about not being able to ship due to warehouse problems, or that the proforma could not be generated – and so I could not pay, and they could not ship…to cut a long story short, I got the units on Tuesday.

It usually is not a problem to have a shipping delay, but in this case, I arranged a meeting with the mechanical engineers working on the project, in order for them to see the device and fit it into the 3D plastics project. They actually measure the parts, as they say working from datasheets can usually spell trouble, so ideally they would take them away after the meeting. Had Matrix simply said “we cannot send it until Monday”, I would have arranged the meeting on Wednesday – no worries. But, as it frequently happens, they wanted to look good, without having the solid ground under their feet to do so.

When a company makes a commitment, whatever it may be, it has to stick to it. And when the costumer calls, obviously pissed off at the poor performance and the mount of problems he has landed on, you have to be hellbent on fixing the situation. If the person answering the phone cannot handle the situation, he/she must be trained to transfer the call to someone who can.

What did I do? I emailed the CEO, Joseph Dunsmore. His email address is not published on Digi’s site, but if you look on the Management Team page, and scroll down a bit, Jan McBride’s email is displayed. It was a case of formatting Joseph’s name in the same manner as Jan’s email, send the diatribe, and wait. The next day, I got a reply from Joseph, telling me he would follow up the case with Digi’s Managing Director in Europe. Not three hours had passed, and I got a call from Digi’s top man in Spain, who was very supportive and understanding. By this time, I had been so smoothed over, that I really didn’t want to complain anymore! The conversation ended up very well, with Digi offering their full support on our development, and a visit arranged sometime next week.

Would I recommend Digi to anyone deciding about whether to use their products? Absolutely!

Finally, after months and months of hype and excitement, AllPeers launched. In Beta of course, lest it not be considered a Web 2.0 company.

Me and a friend installed the FireFox plugin, and fired it up. To start with, the buddy search mechanism is terrible. I actually typed my friend’s name, got a result, and added it to my roster – turns out it wasn’t even his profile. You cannot see details about the search results, which is a problem. With Skype, for example, sometimes you can turn up a dozen of hits on a buddy search, but at least you can get an idea of who is behind each result.

Once added a friend, it was time to share some files. I added a couple to my shared folder, and the files showed up there. My friend could not see them. I refreshed, and the files dissapeared. By the time I ended the test and decided to remove the plugin, I still hadn’t managed to get the files to stay put. My friend shared one file. It showed up twice on my screen (?!). The actual download of the file went well, but after that, the files also dissapeared from his screen.
There are a lot of bugs as it stands – at one stage, I had a buddy selected, but the screen showed “When ABC shares some files, you will see them here”, where ABC was my nickname. When I removed a buddy from my list, I could still see his shared files until I changed the folder view!
Frankly, platforms such as Pando work much better in terms of stability and ease of use. I am sure AllPeers will eventually iron out the issues, but right now, the service is a non-starter. This post also talks about the system being built upon a bug in FireFox, which when fixed will kill its ability to work as a P2P endpoint – any confirmation on this?

I was reading an article over at The Register, an excellent tech news site (don’t forget to check the BOFH!), that explains a plan by Google to use a microphone connected to your PC to record the ambient sound, extract information about what you are watching on a nearby TV, and then deliver targeted advertising to you based on your selection. I wonder what would they deliver if you are a horror movie fan, or if you are watching Sir David Attenborough’s nature documentaries…but I digress.

In my book, this is plain and simple espionage. There are laws in some countries (also at state level in the U.S.) that govern wiretapping and conversation recording; in some cases, recording as long as you have the consent of one of the parties involved is OK, in others it is just plain illegal. Of course, Google would argue that they do not send the actual sound anywhere, but only a mere derived “signature”. Jim Atkinson’s tscm.com site has some really good information on the subject, as he has been dedicated to hunting down the spies for decades.

All this brings me to a new subject, which is the amount of information that Google may already be collecting about you – personally. Do you have a Gmail account? Do you know about something called Google Analytics? Some of you will have already put two and two toghether (answer is not three). Gmail privacy statement mentions:

Google scans the text of Gmail messages in order to filter spam and detect viruses, just as all major webmail services do. Google also uses this scanning technology to deliver targeted text ads and other related information. This is completely automated and involves no humans.

OK, so they have the contents of every email you send and receive, classified in terms of what sort of things you may buy if they present you with targeted advertising. On the other hand, Google Analytics is a statistics tool widely used by people and companies to track usage of their websites with a great deal of precision. Information collected by Analytics includes the IP addresses of visitors, every action they take, and every navigation path they follow.

Now, combine the two bits of information common to your Gmail account, and somebody.com’s tracking data of your browsing session – the IP address used to send the email, or to browse the site. It can be argued that in many cases, these IP address can be dynamic, or belong to a large organization behind a proxy – but hey, Google is now potentially handling millions of bits of statistical data, so they could eventually learn a great deal about what you do online. Now they only need what you are watching on TV, and your assimilation will be complete. Resistance is futile.

Can anyone say separation of powers? If you are really concerned about your privacy, you probably know what this will do, once placed in your hosts file:

# [Google Inc]
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

If you don’t, then welcome to the era of privacy deprivation..

[Edit: I have changed the post's title, as it looks like the strike tag was causing problems with indexers...sigh]