Well it had less effect than I hoped…
The survey shows that the Fon has a 65% failure rate. Almost 2/3 of the kit they shipped was broken. This is an amazing result.
The CEO’s response is to defend the indefensible.
Martin, if you were not going to respond to the survey; why set it up?
Martin must be wondering what he’s started…
FON are selling wireless routers with buggy firmware which makes them unusable.
Imagine that you’d spent a couple of months trying to get a product to work. That the support line of the company that made the product showed themselves to not being able to understand the issue. After months of this you’d given up on the product and replaced it at great cost.
Then the CEO of the company that made the product said this…
“For a CEO of a start up who launches a new product what just happened to me is very discouraging.”
It maybe upsetting for you but I assure you that being a customer was worse. Especially, when I read constantly that your company had recently started making serious money on the back of a dud product.
Why is the CEO upset; because people dared to rain on a new product launch…
“I wrote a post about the new Fonera SIMPL that we will soon launch, I mentioned that is called SIMPL because as opposed to the Fonera 2.0N it is not a buffer to the cloud, and I was surprised at the amount of extremely negative comments that I got about the quality of the Fonera 2.0N.”
Worse, it seems that the little bubble of protection around our CEO was caused by reading popular blogs.
“I am suprised because the reviews we got in blogs like Techcrunch, Wired, Boing Boing and many others are positive and the comments that you can see here are extremely negative.”
Mr CEO, do you really believe that Wired plugged in the model and used it for more than a couple of hours. Trying living with this Fonera; it doesn’t work.
For the other point of view…
Didn’t know this…
“Fon has to provide special VPN tunneling technology in the UK for the UK secret services to investigate suspected criminals and terrorists when they log on to our WiFi signal.”
Why are European governments able to do more for less when it comes to National Security?
And to be honest I’m not too comfortable now that I know that it exists. Are all Fon’s the same? Or is this just included in boxes sent to the UK?
Tell us more… please!
It sucks!
First Fon sent an email offering three Fon routers as Christmas presents! Fantastic idea and I ordered within hours. I started planning who were going to get them; in fact, they were going to three different countries (Holland, the USA and France).
But they didn’t arrive. No word from Fon about if they were shipped. I sent an email to their support but didn’t get a reply. I’m now missing three routers; do I have to pay the 100€ to get them?
This really sucks because I have no idea about what to do now!
I love Fon, I got my first router via LeWeb3 last year and it’s been on in my appartment ever since. I’ve also had great fun giving invitations to friends in three different countries.
Then they go and do this for Christmas…
WE’RE GIVING YOU THREE FREE FON ROUTERS TO CELEBRATE THIS HOLIDAY SEASON OF SHARING!
Fantastic idea! I’m now having fun deciding who I’m going to give them to.
Fon have a great application out for the iPhone, it allows you to connect to open Fon connections while out roaming.
In the comments people are already asking for the Windows Mobile version; yes please!
Why don’t they have this for Windows and Macs; that would save having to always log in using the web pages.