BT Does U-turn to Offer Unlimited Mobile Data to UK School Kids

A couple of days ago BT and EE pledged to help support children’s education in the UK during the COVID-19 lockdown by giving 20GB of free mobile data (mobile broadband) per month to “disadvantaged families” (here), but now they’ve decided to boost this to “unlimited” and there’s more..

The additional support is being provided through their new “Lockdown Learning” scheme. All of the features it offers will be provided to customers eligible for the Department for Education’s (DfE) Get Help with Technology programme.

The welcome change means that both BT and EE will now provide eligible mobile customers with an “unlimited data” allowance (as opposed to just 20GB), which matches what Three UK has done. On top of that they’re also offering “free WiFi vouchers” to schools and charity partners for access to BT’s national network of WiFi Hotspots across the UK.

At the same time BT intend to adopt zero rating on educational websites. “We will also aim to remove all mobile data charges, for some of the most popular educational websites before the end of this month, while schools remain closed,” said the operator (more details on this are expected next week).

Marc Allera, CEO of BT Group’s Consumer Division, said:

“As a national champion, we want to ensure no one is left behind while face-to-face teaching is on hold.

That’s why we’re launching our ‘Lockdown Learning’ support scheme, which offers a number of different ways for disadvantaged school children to get connectivity support, across both our fixed and mobile networks.

We’ve been working closely with the DfE since the start of the pandemic, to help get kids connected, and we’re now stepping up our partnership to offer unlimited data, as well as working harder on getting free WiFi passes into the hands of those families and kids that need them.

We’re also aiming to zero rate some of the most popular learning portals this month, to ensure critical learning can continue even when data access runs out. We’ll reveal more on this in the coming week.”

On top of that BT say they’ve updated their online educational resources, tech tips and digital skills via their BT Skills for Tomorrow programme (here). All of this is no doubt going to be quite costly for the operator to do, but it’s a hugely welcome improvement on what they initially announced.

UPDATE 2:30pm

A separate article on the BBC reports that BT began offering Wi-Fi vouchers to disadvantaged children from June 2020, but “unfortunately the Department of Education struggled to distribute these vouchers effectively and handed them back to us.” In response the DfE said a pilot of the scheme had not provided a “reliable and consistent” internet connection.

In our view the challenge here is that most homes won’t be covered by one of BT’s premium WiFi hotspots and might thus only be able to get a BT WiFi signal if they live right next door to somebody with an existing BT Broadband connection – the shared WiFi for that is often distributed from the ISP’s router using FON technology.

However, only a small amount of bandwidth is made available for FON and the WiFi signal would be extremely weak by the time it reached inside the next property, which would indeed make it quite a poor solution for modern educational needs. Lest we forget that disadvantaged children often also live in areas were local fixed broadband connectivity is poor. Given all this, WiFi vouchers are not terribly useful solution.