BT WiFi Expands Public Wireless Internet to 7.5 Million Global Hotspots

BT WiFi has announced that its global wifi network is now home to 7.5 million public wireless internet hotspots (4.5m in the UK), which are offered free to the ISPs existing fixed-line broadband ISP customers but everybody else has to pay a small fee.

The 7.5m figure includes over 500,000 hotspots in Greater London (mostly as a result of the London 2012 Olympic Games) and more than 65,000 in Birmingham and Leeds, around 72,000 in Manchester, Edinburgh and Sheffield, and more than 59,000 in Liverpool, Brighton, Bristol and Cardiff.

The operators related Smartphone app, which is intended to make it easier to find related hotspots, has also been release for Windows Mobile devices (e.g. Nokia Lumia 920). The app is already available for iOS (iPhone etc.), Android and Blackberry based tables and mobiles.

Andy Baker, CEO of BTWi-Fi, said:

“Our mission is to make it easy to find and use BT Wi-fi at our 4.5 million UK hotspots. The new Windows Mobile app completes our stable of apps, making it really easy to find a hotspot out and about, no matter what type of device you are using.”

The vast majority of BT’s 4.5m UK wireless hotspots actually come from customers of their fixed line broadband service, many of whom freely share their home WiFi out over the operators FON technology. But the quality of these FON hotspots tends to be lower than BT’s dedicated ones and related services often fail to stretch outside of homes (weak signal), which makes them of limited use.

Subscription prices for BTWiFi start at just £6 a month for 500 minutes of access, although there are various other pre-paid models to choose from and you can also pay 18p a minute for access.