The largest WiFi network in the world?

Posted October 4, 2007 at 07:51 PM by Chris Marshall

Section: Computers, Networking, Wireless

I don’t live in the UK anymore but I imagine that they are rejoicing in the streets at the news that FON has teamed up with BT to cover the whole UK with BT FON free Wi-Fi hotspots. Of course there is a slight catch as users have to share a small portion of their home broadband connection by opening up a separate secure channel on their wireless router in order to participate, but given the amount of people that don’t secure their home Wi-Fi connections I don’t see that being too much of an issue.

Gavin Patterson, BT Group managing director, Consumer, said: “This is the start of something very exciting for BT. Today we are launching a people’s network of Wi-Fi, which could one day cover every street in Britain. “We are giving our millions of broadband customers a choice and an opportunity. If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband connections of 190,000 others without paying a penny.

“We have built a public Wi-Fi network and 12 Wireless Cities already, but today we are saying to customers, let’s build a Wi-Fi community together, which covers everywhere and serves everyone.”

That is great news for the 3 million BT broadband users, and not bad news for would be iPhone users when it launches. Will sort of dull the pain caused by the lack of 3G.

Via [CrunchGear]