BT Wi-Fi Bring Public Wireless Internet to 5 Million UK and Ireland Hotspots

BT WiFi has announced that it’s now home to a network of 5 Million public Wi-Fi hotspots in the United Kingdom and Ireland. But most of those come from customers of BT’s Total Broadband packages and its FON supporting routers that automatically turn home connections into public wifi access points.

According to BT, its national network grows by 20,000 hotspots a week and last year (April 2012 to March 2013) recorded more than 400 million connections. On top of that their wifi network also reported a total data consumption of 13 Petabytes during the same period, which equates to 13 Billion MegaBytes if you prefer.

Andy Baker, BT Wi-fi CEO, said:

“The time wi-fi users spend online and the amount of data they’re using is up across our network. People are now so confident and comfortable with their gadgets, we’ve had to meet the demand with more hotspots in a wider choice of places – on the high street and in thousands of neighbourhoods across the country.”

It should be noted that the quality of BT’s FON hotspots tend to be lower than their dedicated ones. The latter are premium services that BTWiFi installs at various shopping centres, cafes, hotels and airports etc.

By comparison the FON based services often fail to stretch much outside of homes (weak signal) and tend to offer a lower quality. On the other hand all BT Broadband customers are given FREE access to BTWiFi.

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