Open Letter to Martin Varsavsky

Well, some weeks ago I sent this open letter to Martin Varsavsky (the owner of FON.COM) - not expecting an answer at all. (Of course, I got none)

Dear Martin,

one of my principles is to never break a promise I made. Today I will break one. I will break my promise to leave my Fon always on and I will also convert it to a useful device (OpenWRT). Are you interested why? Then read on.

1. First I thought it (the service) could be useful for my travels. This turned out to be a stupid idea as the FON spots were either not reachable (technical problems) or too far away from my hotel. No, I am not chosing my hotel based on FON spots but on company budget.

2. Then I thought I could use it for the holiday flats we have in our village. I thought I could do something good to increase the FON community. How disappointed I was when I realized that there is no WDS (wireless distribution service). Do you really think that I will put 10 additional cables into the flats only to get those Foneros to work? NO. Every sh... device out there has WDS enabled. So, no excuse.

3. The social component - There are some posts circulating that a "troup" of FONEROS will visit me if I turn off the device. How this "convincing troup" will look like I have no idea - I hope that they meant it as a way of helping me technically to increase the reliability of my FON service. Still, that one sheds a strage light onto the FON community and FON in general.

4. I will not comment on the overheated FONs and the troubles with the dual SSIDs. This is a well-known fact. Let's use this defect: A few weeks ago I discovered a physical defect in the FON which basically leaves me without a useful service (also for the FON users outside). Huge amounts of lost packages bringing my WLAN to a screeching halt. Let's take this issue to Nr. 5.

5. Last week I posted a comment to http://blog.fon.com/de/archive/technology/foninfo-firmware-versionen.html - I was searching the Web for a possible solution to my problem described in 4. Reading one comment where the moderator denied every knowledge of non-working FONs I decided to write a blog comment. I basically described my easy setup (FON connected by LAN to my Router) and my problem. I wanted to point out that there ARE non-working FONs. Nevertheless - guess what happened? The post got deleted. Doh. I wonder whether it got deleted because I spoke out a painful truth or because I posted it anonymously (fearing that they suspend my FON service) Well - the moderator of this blog is a rude guy with a block ward / wonk mentality. Unbelievable that YOU allow that. Community stops where censorship starts.


So, feel free to reply.
Ruediger

So - after I got no answer I decided to try the OpenWRT. Very nice and stable distribution. However I was unable to play with BATMAN and or OLSR probably due to my lack of info how it works. So I decided to install the Open-Mesh firmware which is OpenWRT with an extension to OpenWRT. All coupled with a nice and free (as in beer) administrative web site.