BT & FON aim to make the world one big WiFi community

By Stuart Corner
Thursday, 04 October 2007 16:09

Home IT

BT has teamed up with FON, an organisation that enables anyone operating a WiFi hotspot to make it available to casual users, and earn money by doing so.

FON (www.fon.com ) already claims more than 500,000 members who have access to more than 190,000 access points worldwide. Under their new partnership, BT and FON will expand on this network by BT making its existing UK public hotspot network, BT OpenZone, available to FON members and by encouraging all its three million broadband customers to join the FON community.

BT claims that "the revolutionary idea for a massive WiFi community, built by individual people and not a large corporate enterprise, marks BT's boldest step yet in building extensive broadband coverage outside of the home or office. Every person who agrees to share a small portion of their home broadband connection, by opening up a separate, secure channel on their wireless router, will be able to share the connection of any other member."

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 WiFi, which could one day cover every street in Britain. We are giving our millions of Total Broadband customers a choice and an opportunity. If they are prepared to securely share a little of their broadband, they can share the broadband at hundreds of thousands of FON and BT OpenZone hotspots today, without paying a penny."