BT to UK customers: Share your WiFi... please!
ISPs aren't known for encouraging users to share bandwidth, but that's exactly what BT wants UK customers to do. The Spanish WiFi specialist FON offers routers that enable people to "securely" share their high-speed connections with strangers …
Context & Ripple Effects
The move lands two days after BT and FON unveiled the BT FON Community, the Spanish startup's first major telco partnership and a bid to turn BT's Total Broadbase into hundreds of thousands of hotspots covering the U.K. For FON — described in its own launch materials as the world's largest WiFi community and pitched explicitly at telcos and ISPs — this is the validation deal that founder Martin Varsavsky had been courting since blognation flagged the tie-up earlier in the week.
The unusual part is the posture: ISPs typically police bandwidth use, yet BT is actively recruiting its own customers to open their lines to strangers through FON-enabled routers, betting that a crowdsourced hotspot footprint is cheaper than building one.
First-order effects
- Every BT Total Broadband customer who opts in converts their home connection into a publicly accessible FON hotspot, giving BT a nationwide WiFi footprint funded by subscribers' own bandwidth rather than capital expenditure.
- FON gets its flagship carrier partner and instant scale in the U.K., moving from grassroots community to ISP-distributed platform overnight.
Second-order effects
- Rival UK broadband providers face pressure to match the offer — either by joining FON-style sharing schemes or striking their own hotspot partnerships — before BT's community network becomes a differentiator on retail broadband packages.
- Other ISPs evaluating FON now have a template: the BT deal makes carrier distribution, not organic sign-ups, the growth channel, which raises the stakes for FON's negotiations elsewhere in Europe.
Third-order effects
- If subscriber-shared hotspots hold up legally and technically, the home router becomes part of the public access layer, shifting WiFi coverage economics from owned infrastructure toward customers' flat-rate connections.
- A pattern of carriers sanctioning bandwidth sharing would force clearer terms around liability and traffic management — questions ISPs have so far avoided by simply forbidding sharing.
The trend: Broadband providers are beginning to treat customers' home connections as distributable hotspot infrastructure, outsourcing network reach to subscriber routers instead of build-outs.