BT WiFi Completes 500000 London UK WiFi Wireless Hotspots Target

Telecoms operator BT has today announced the completion of its plan to deploy 500,000 wireless hotspots (wifi), each offering internet access across Greater London, for the 2012 Olympic Games. The move was made possible after the operator added a batch of new hotspots along 27 miles of the River Thames.

The news marks a significant improvement upon BT WiFi’s last update during May 2012, when they were still 25,000 short of the target (475,000). However the vast majority of BT’s hotspots have come from the operators community of retail fixed line broadband ISP subscribers, many of whom freely share their home wifi out over the operators FON platform with other customers.

Andy Baker, CEO of BT Wi-fi, said:

“We’re giving Londoners and visitors as many places as possible to get online, keep in touch, work and share their experiences of the exciting events happening across London.”

BT is also the sole provider of public wifi inside the Olympic Park venue, which has involved the installation of around 1,000 access points across nine Olympic venues (e.g. the Olympic Stadium, the Aquatics Centre, Velodrome and all the public areas of the Olympic Park). So far more than 1 billion wi-fi minutes were used over the last three months on BT Wifi.

In addition, BT claims that users of its wifi service in the Olympic Park have enjoyed 100%  availability and are typically enjoying upload and download rates of 20Mbps or more.