FON Boards

As Martin has said in his spanish blog, passes prices will lower in 2 weeks

and 4000 foneras/month sales in Japan...
hmm... http://maps.francofon.fr/graph_pays.php?pays=jp
no mentioning about Comstar...
thnx for the info...will blog about it

He just proved that we were right. I remember a thread of mine......viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4565&start=0

It is actually a positive sign. Thanks!

any news is positive!
I've blogged it yesterday evening on the Dutch FONblog
someone allready asked what kind of deals FON is discussing with the Portuguese touroperators

Of course, the last thing Martin would ever admit to is that we were right. We do not exist, except when we agree with him and applaud him.

Martin does not write about Fon in English any more. Would someone care to translate his reasons for abandoning the higher prices after only 3 months? I'm betting "bad idea", "declining sales" and "Fonero's objections" are not in his vocabulary.

Now what remains is for us to discover what Martin really means when he says "pass prices" and "lower", since there's always a trick involved. ALWAYS.

Also, why didn't David_FON add his comment about lowered prices to the end of the existing thread "New FON_access prices"? It would seem to be on topic. This thread should be moved to append the existing thread.

In the meantime Martin resumed writing in English, but nothing about the future of FON so far. I can not read spanish, so I can't help you with the translation.

While I never shy away from saying "told you so", I am indeed surprised about this 180, in such a short time. "Stay the course" is not always a good idea, but three month seems a bit short for a thorough evaluation. This makes the impression of a panic move.

So let us wait another fortnight and see what the real changes will be...

Certainly positive news.

You can use Google translate in order to read it in english.

What martin wrote was:

"Como mis lectores me advirtieron, nos pasamos con el aumento de tarifas para los aliens. Las vamos a volver a bajar en dos semanas. Este fue un error, pero que demostró las ventajas para un CEO de tener un blog. Cuando los Bills me criticaron me di cuenta que habíamos cometido un error."

Translation:

"As my readers warned me, we went too far with the price increase on the Alien tariffs. We will lower them in 2 weeks. That was a mistake but it proved me the adventages for a CEO of having a blog. When the Bills criticized me I realiced that we made a mistake"

AustinTX: I did not append this thread to the older one about the pricing because being on it's own will get more relevance and will be easier to find.

David, I am pleased that our cristisism was heard, but I must say, I have a bit of a problem believing this was the only reason. Why else wait three month to correct the error?

I suspect the sales figures spoke louder than our cristisism.

the sales figure is bad because together with the raise in price the service went down as well;
aliens were not able to even connect...
was somewhere solved on 27 december although some reported to be down still in january...

You shouldn't be surprised at all. This is standard move. First they say "oh, we increase the price with XX % and we'll get XX % more income! Then, when this doesn't happen, it's time for the new tactic. We'll decrease price with XX % BUT we'll get MANY MANY more customers because of this price drop that we'll make again YY % profit! These are only tactics meant to buy time before closing the bussiness forever.
There have been more than 10M iPhones sold, most of them with some kind of unlimited (or close to unlimited) data traffic. Already people mentioned here cheap plans for mobile 3G in all combinations (prepaid daily unlimited, monthly unlimited, etc). We all know Fon (at least in this form) will go rather soon the way many things went (think BBSes or if you don't know what they are dinosaurus). There isn't anything bad in this but I'm sad that for the time we still have there isn't anything done for the people providing the infrastructure who don't care about day passes and some other marketing crap but would want simple stuff like more reliable maps that reflect the real situation and availability of Fon hotspots.

hey hey hey...don't offend my BBS...it's still running (at least the Fidonet part is...oh that's a tyronausaur
analog lines are still in operation untill 2014... then it will probably be "telnet" only
I would even be interested in getting the bbs software running ON the fonera

And also to bury the previous thread which Martin so mildly describes as "criticism".

If I wanted to bury it, there's more effective things to do than a new thread.. and no one stops you from adding what I wrote here to the other thread

What on earth would possess me to transcribe the text of this duplicate thread onto the end of the existing thread? I made a proper request for the concatenation of this thread onto the existing one. I have no means by which to compel you to do the right thing, if you prefer to be silly instead. It is interesting that you've given thought to effective ways to bury threads, though.

Oh c'mon, give the guy a break. He is just doing his job. Nobody likes to advertise his mistakes. Martin has already admitted it was a mistake. So why keep harping on David?

We were right, they were wrong. Water under the bridge.

I was extremely polite to him, despite the frivolity of his suggestion. I'm obviously not blaming David for Fon's poor decisions. He's in customer support, which is usually the last department to find out what's going on, and has the least opportunity to influence the Suits. Also notable is the irony of your particular choice of words "just doing his job".
So much water.... So many bridges... you must be a saint, Roetzen.

He is.