Very interesting report about how BT wants to create the world’s largest WiFi network by leveraging on the fact that most household wireless hubs are used very little. If we put this in perspective, we are using our potential capacity to a bare minimum. Take my own hub for example.
During the day, it is used intermittently by my wife for her research, emails and other stuff. It increases a bit when my daughter gets home from nursery and hits the cBBC site. It further increases a bit when my son gets on the World of Warcraft site or is browsing YouTube or Google Videos. And then I come in for my bit of browsing and net work. But despite when all of us are hitting the net, our average utilisation has never exceeded 40% of the rated capacity.
So you might ask, what’s the benefit to me if I open up my network to you? Well, this is what BT is proposing:
In exchange for opening up a part of their network for public use, BT broadband customers will get free access to the network across the country, BT’s 2,000 existing public hotspots and to more than 190,000 hotspots operated around the world by FON, the Spanish wireless start-up with which BT has worked on the project.
Pretty interesting, eh? By the way, this is what I meant by private investments when I was telling the British Government off for trying to use public monies for this kind of investments in my previous post.
All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!
