Ireland’s favorite podcaster, Tom Raftery got to do a short (shorter than planned) recorded interview with Martin Varsavsky of FON. Martin wasn’t able to answer all the questions in the time so I posted up some answers to the questions Tom and his readers has posed.

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My friend Martin Varsavsky has announced a major partnership and EUR 18m fundraising deal for FON that will change the way we think about mobile computing. That’s a dramatic thing to say, and it’s been said before, but this time it really is true.

FON will basically mean that any Internet user who wants it can have mobile access wherever they want it, wherever there is broadband access available locally. They will be confident that they can get the access at a reasonable price, or for ‘Linus’ participants, for free. (A Linus is any user who shares his/her WiFi in exchange for free access throughout the Community wherever there is coverage.)

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O’Connell Street, Dublin’s most important thoroughfare now has a FON hotspot, located at Funland, near the Spire. There should be good reception from it on the east side of the street, opposite the GPO.

Matthew Sammon writes about using John Handelaar’s service for converting Irish street names to coordinates. He has very good points, but a few provisos:

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Ethan Zuckerman who has done great work helping bring the Internet to the ‘second billion’ of the world’s population is at the Al Jazeera forum in Qatar. It’s good to get an Arab view on the world.

Rodrigo writes about his new laptop skin from aspoke.com.

Rodrigo is a regular attendee and speaker at conferences and exhibitions – and this gives him another way to get the message out!

Warning! The introductory price on aspoke.com laptop skins (EUR 18/USD 23) including shipping anywhere in the world ends soon!

I changed my phone account from Vodafone Ireland over to Meteor. I’m expecting to save maybe EUR 300 or 500 a year on my EUR 1200-a-year account. I am generally pretty happy so far. They gave me a shiny new phone with lots of features (the Ericsson w800i, which is more of a ‘groovy’ phone than a business phone). They even rang me to tell me I’d won a gift voucher in a draw as a result of my purchase.

I am making this change mainly on price grounds. Vodafone is just too expensive for what I’m getting. They have good customer service (though Meteor is OK, but not as good), loads of shops, great ads and a 3G network. They also work hard at getting and retaining business customers. They have more business-oriented handsets than Meteor (although they are still not as good as the ones available in the UK, and the prices are high considering the amount I spend on calls). But I just don’t need all that stuff. I’d rather a decent, basic service without too many frills.

Meteor has also been given added credibility through being bought by Eircom. Everyone is confident in Meteor’s future now, something that wasn’t true two years ago.

I still see a gap in the marketplace however and the existing operators are ignoring it at their peril. Meteor are obviously moving up-market to cater for customers like me. O2 and Vodafone are moving towards the middle market. But the operators are leaving a big gap for the entry of a cheap-n-cheerful operator providing a basic product for people who want a simple service. Easymobile attempted it in the UK. It wasn’t so successful there, mainly because there are already a large number of low-frills products in the market (Virgin Mobile – a company I have worked with in the past, Carphone Warehouse, Tesco Mobile) and as a result Easymobile are having a tough time establishing themselves.

In Denmark, however, it’s a different story. The low-cost offerings of Telmore and CBB ultimately resulted in a restructuring of the Danish model which forced Orange to close its operations there and go home.

One way or another someone is going to get into the marketplace and offer this sort of deal. They’re going to make a lot of money, if they manage their costs well (a low-cost operator shouldn’t have to carry the burden of operating shops and giving out subsidized handsets). It’s just a question of who figures out how to do it.

There’s also a longer-term game which nobody has really figured out – the low-cost, high-service operator. As the market matures and handset prices get ever cheaper, even high-end customers won’t want to pay a premium for what is basically a commodity. Reliability, efficiency and economy will become the watchwords of the industry, rather than free handsets, fancy customer service and retail stores.

Disclaimer: I consult around the mobile telecomms area to companies in Ireland.

Digital Rights Ireland was in court on Tuesday to hear Justice Peter Kelly’s decision on filesharing. We had written to the parties to ask that our concerns be taken into consideration. In the end, the decision, which was reported in electricnews.net and on the DRI site did not go the way we would have liked. I am very concerned that people’s private information is being handed over without any detailed consideration of their right to privacy.

There are still arguments to be made and there will be future opportunities to make our case more strongly. However it is worth saying loudly that dealing with these types of issues in the courts is expensive. Digital Rights Ireland is dependent on supporters’ contributions to keep the battle going.

Aspoke.com, my laptop style brand is moving along nicely. There’s a steady stream of orders and interest. We have all the usual problems of growth – space, logistics, capital and so on. But the product is good, and it’s getting better as we learn more about what the marketplace wants. Thanks to everyone for their support so far!

The picture is my laptop with a FON-branded skin. The FON logo and colours are so cool! (Picture is taken with my new SonyEricsson w800i phone, which is why it’s not the greatest quality photo ever.)