Free nationwide WiFi in the UK courtesy of FON and BT

Ken sez, "FON and British Telecom have partnered to create the BT FON Community to cover the entire U.K. with hundreds of thousands of BT FON hotspots. Very cool! FON has the interesting, copyleft-ish 'you share yours, you get others for free' model, or you can go all capitalistic and share revenue from your hotspot with them. This agreement will really ramp up their networking effect in the UK."

Every person in the UK who agrees to share a small portion of their home broadband connection will be able to share the connection of any other member. Anyone joining in will be able to use those FON hotspots across the world and all the new BT FON hotspots free of charge.

From the very beginning, all of you, Foneros, believed in the concept of sharing and in people's ability to build something important that would benefit everyone. BT is one of the most important telcos and ISPs in the world, so with BT FON those beliefs have proved to be well-founded!

Link (Thanks, Ken!)

See also:
Free WiFi routers from FON for 10,000 Americans
Spanish ISP wants its customers to share WiFi

[#1 posted by pepsi_max2k , October 4, 2007 10:36 AM]

FON ceo Martin Varsavsky has been writing about the deal in his blog (which I love btw, especially how open he is about stuff) http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/

The latest is his reply to an article suggesting he's paying for every BT customer signed up:

"This story in Techcrunch and in GigaOm is wrong. Hey Om, are we buddies or not? Next time pls check with me. Do you think el fonero jefe here would pay BT $10 dolares per fonero they get??? No way jose."

[#2 posted by stevew , October 4, 2007 11:23 AM]

Shucks, I was hoping that Negroponte's 2002 "Lily Pads" predictions had finally come true. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/wireless.html