Residential customers dominate WiFi hotspot numbers
BT said today that it now has 3.5 million BT Openzone WiFi hotspots in service across the UK and Ireland – a number it described as forming “one of the biggest WiFi networks in the world”.
Residential and enterprise customers that have signed up for BT’s FON service can access any other FON-enabled hotspot: FON is the service that gives a hotspot a secure private iD as well as a second public iD that allows another user to use the access point.
The vision of millions of hotspots offering widespread secure WiFi access to mobile users is one that has been proposed as either a threat to mobile operators or a welcome “free” backhaul network. BT said it has six million customers who are entitled to access FON hotspots, many of them through wholesale relationships with mobile operators who offer their subscribers Openzone access as part of their tariff packages.
However, a BT spokesperson told me that of those 3.5 million hotspots, 3.3 million are residential FON hotspots. I think this reduces the use case for the “ubiquitous” WiFi network considerably, as users usually require coverage in a range of locations (bars, cafes, shops etc) that does not typically include “in the street outside other people’s houses”. You could say, therefore, that across the UK and Ireland, BT has “only” 200,000 truly public hotspots that are in locations of real use to the majority of users.
My suspicion is that this means that actual “on the move” use of the FON network is pretty low. This is just a hunch, so I asked a BT spokesperson for an insight into how many of its users are accessing FON services in a variety of different locations – in other words, how much use its customers are making of the ability to access service through someone’s else’s WiFi router. BT said it would get back to me on this but pretty much said not to hold my breath.
So, does anyone think BT FON, or similar services in other countires, could yet provide a useful adjunct to cellular services if hotspot discovery and automatic authentication could be taken care of?