FON Boards

Anyone else think it is BS that Fon is now taking a bigger chunk under the guise of Fees and Taxes in the US. First of all there is no tax! Furthermore any processing fees should come out of their half. We are paying for the Bandwidth/Power/Hardware that is our cost of business theirs is processing fees. I can run a hotpot on my own and keep100% of the revenue, why do I need Fon and it's greed!

I agree. I blogged about this recently... take a look at it for some more of my thoughts.

I wrote Fon customer service repeatedly for information on what the money collected in the USA goes to, and the person was most unhelpful. All of his answers were vague, incomplete, and reflected his lack of knowledge or desire to research. In fact, his answers at first were dead wrong (he told me that the VAT tax was paid for USA transactions!). He echoed back fragments of my question as though they were the answer. Who do they have working in customer service, ELIZA? His favorite tactic was to "misunderstand" my question, and go off on undesired tangents.

I wrote back repeatedly in order to retrain the focus of my question, and to ask about percentages that were still unaccounted for... I wrote to the general email address, but it was unfortunately always the same person responding. He threw me one or two more red herrings and then told me that all of the agents there had been instructed to give me the same non-answers, and that I should not write back. I did anyway, and was of course completely ignored.

I won't name that person here, but you can read the comments in my blog and about a dozen other blogs for it. VERY bad customer service!

A footnote: it's interesting that Martin Varsavsky wrote in his blog, blaming the failure of Fon in the USA to OUR GREED!

Wow I can't believe the treatment you received! They really tried to sneek this one past us. I also emailed them. If we do not get a reply and we are not credited back the extra charge we will be zapping our fons with DD-WRT and moving to WorldSpot.net and chillispot. With WorldSpot you get to set your own rates and you take home 75%!

Yeah, i've identified that customer service agent as the spawn of a high-ranking Fon operative. Figures.

Probably the only reason that no mainstream reporters have exposed Fon's USA irregularities is because 1) Fon is no longer a compelling news item, 2) Fon is quite complex, and many people don't have the time to figure out and to ponder all of the implications. Even after 3 years, i'm still realizing little things here and there.

As great as it is, DD-WRT might still be a little balky on a La Fonera, since there is extremely limited memory. However, OpenWRT of various flavors seems to be a nice, lightweight alternative. In fact, the abilities restored by installing FreeWLAN may be enough for most people.

I'll check out worldspot. It sounds interesting. My blog's sidebar contains a whole list of hotspot-in-a-box providers like Fon, who typically offer much better profit-sharing deals, and their firmware contains numerous features which Fon has simply had no interest in offering (which FreeWLAN does a good job of partially restoring).

It's time for Fon to stop acting like a groundbreaking leader, and start studying all the other startups. Foneros are simply not happy, and Fon's response has been to suppress or ignore. Martin has a plane to catch.

Agreed! the original deal was 50/50 now they have rewritten it. It is time to move on. Austin do you have any links for a billing frontend that works with DD-WRT/chillispot/radius? I zapped a fon with dd-wrt and it seems to work great. Instead of sharing the profits I would rather capture 100% of the funds and do the billing myself.

Yes, while I can't remember precisely which ones, some of my links lead to networks which permit you to bring your own router, with or without their custom firmware. Like Fon, they simply host a RADIUS server, and web pages which handle billing, and customized login page. If you know how to configure Chilispot, or an equivalent, on some kind of router (or perhaps a Linux PC with wifi AP attached), then you can have your own free, or for-pay hotspot, under the terms of these other networks. Martin Varsavsky has described these in his blog as "Fon imitations", though I know quite a few were in business before Fon.

A past employer of mine gave me the privilege of free server hosting and a considerable amount of bandwidth. If I still had that deal, I would very probably offer the exact same service that Fon does: RADIUS server and Paypal scripted web pages. I'd also host a forum where people compiled and tested firmware robustness, security, and other projects. I wouldn't be so crass as to impose my own DNS server, of course. While I couldn't promise every feature request, there would be a whole heck of a lot more than Fon offers.

This is the same answer I gave to ggg, I think it is interesting for everyone:

On the terms and conditions that you agreed when you joined Fon it was explained that the profits of the passes will be divided 50%50 with the Bill user once the fees and taxes are deducted from the ammount. You can find the terms and condittions at: http://www.fon.com/en/legal
We don't have taxes for selling passes in USA, but the fees are the ones charged by Paypal and Click&Buy, they vary depending on the transaction ammount and how much money have we "moved" with them.
The formula for splitting the money is: (Pass ammount - Taxes - Fees)/2 so for example, on a One Day pass ($3) the Bill gets (3 - 0 - 0.375)/2 = $1.31 (fees are approximate, I don't have the exact fee ammount right now)
For more information on the Paypal fees, please check:
https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/websc ... es-outside
If you have any other questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Let me explain why this explanation is inadequate: For most people, they hear "the money collected is split 50/50", and expect $1.50 per Alien per day. For some others, experienced with financial terminology and business, they may expect ~slightly~ less than half of the money collected. NONE OF US expect that our "half" will somehow work out to be 1/3 or less of the money collected (as in the case of the UK)! Fon gives this same vague description to everyone, regardless of their circumstances.
Thank you, that is very interesting. After 7 emails to Fon "Customer Care", I recieved none of the information you've just offered here. Also, you mention "Click&Buy", which was unknown to me altogether. You would think that these entities were secret, the way the person was behaving, who intercepted my emails.
I wonder if you might elaborate please, on these two entities. It seems obvious that the amount of money "moved" will be identical since Aliens are always purchasing in $€3 increments. Therefore, the percentages given to Paypal and Click&Buy should be simple for Fon to provide to us. Even if the fees are to change over time, due to large volumes of business, Fon can and should itemize the current percentage on weekly or monthy intervals.

The bottom line is that "fees" and "taxes" does not provide Foneros with an amount by which they may check their profitsharing balances. It is such a vague term that Fon may as well say "we split whatever is left over after we deduct an amount of our choosing for other purposes".

Fon must itemize the taxes which apply to the Fonero's hotspot locations. Fon must itemize the fees which applied at the time of the transaction. Otherwise, Fon is operating their business in the dark, and Bills, who are indeed Fon franchisers, are forced to take Fon's word for whatever money comes out of that dark tube.

Fulfillment would be as simple as maintaining a chart of fees and taxes in each country on Fon's website.