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Home / News / BT Fon launches worldwide Wi-Fi

BT Fon launches worldwide Wi-Fi

[intro] BT Broadband offers customers a giant Wi-Fi love-in [/intro] BT has today announced a partnership with Google-backed Spanish company Fon t

[intro] BT Broadband offers customers a giant Wi-Fi love-in [/intro]

BT has today announced a partnership with Google-backed Spanish company Fon to offer its broadband customers the chance to be part of the world’s biggest free Wi-Fi sharing community, BT Fon.

What’s the catch? Well, a relatively small one – customers agree to share a portion of their home broadband connection by opening up a separate, secure channel on their wireless router, thus contributing to a Wi-Fi hotspot.

This means that thousands of community Wi-Fi hotspots in the UK could open up really soon – there are already 500,000 Fon members (or Foneros) worldwide, covering more than 190,000 hotspots.

It’s a canny move from BT – with minimum fuss and outlay, it can offer potential broadband customers access to its existing Wi-Fi network, BT Openzone, as well as the new Fon hotspots, all free of charge.

And because it’s community-based, I suspect it means that BT Broadband can avoid too many customer support issues – although in my experience it seems to be doing just dandy at avoiding these already.

It also throws up the possibility of BT Fusion mobile customers could make cheap calls from their phones when near a hotspot – more on that when I get confirmation.

[sigh] That could be me, sat there with those ladies, insouciantly enjoying some free Wi-Fi – if I hadn’t just switched to another provider. I’d be interested to find out how this progresses – anyone who signs up, please let me know how it’s going – and if it affects your broadband speeds…

Profile image of Dan Grabham Dan Grabham Editor-in-Chief

About

Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home