FON-ISP Partnership Vastly Grows Hotspot Reach

IanFogg | June 03, 2008, 11:43 AM

BT has just announced it has reached 100,000 WiFi hotspots through its use of FON public WiFi sharing on its broadband customers' home gateways.

This is a vast number. Hotspot directory Jiwire currently lists just 28,697 total hotspots in the UK. Clearly, they aren't including the BT FON ones.

How it works is simple: Any BT Home Hub user can choose to opt-in to FON. In so doing, their home broadband connection becomes available to others for secure guest access, and they can make use of other FON hotspots. The BT Home Hub is provided for free to new BT Retail broadband customers.

FON has similar relationships with ISPs in other countries, such as Jazztel in Spain, and Neuf in France.

Clearly, many of those BT FON hotspots are going to be in poor locations, such as sleepy residential streets. But by sheer mass of numbers a large number will still be in good locations.

Also, as this is a software change to existing home gateways supplied by an ISP, unlike the pure FON-branded WiFi access points available direct from FON, the majority of these BT FON access points will be switched on and available 24/7. Even more significantly, they should be located at a fixed and predictable location as they are tied to a consumer's broadband subscription.

In the past, FON has had trouble with both FON access points being switched off and being located at a different location to the address the customer first registered. FON has overcome the first issue by showing on their website which FON hotspots have been 'live' within the last hour. The location problem remains for non-ISP provided FON hotspots.

If BT decides to switch from opt-in now, to opt-out, then this 100k number could be dwarfed by a sizeable share of BT's 4.5 million (or so) retail broadband customers. There's a precedent, just recently, BT Retail chose to roll out FON to its small business users using just such as opt-out basis.