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BT Wi-fi is the new name for, er, BT’s Wi-Fi, as the telecom giant rebrands its BT Fon and BT OpenZone offerings, going with a lowercase ‘f’ in ‘Wi-fi’, just to keep us guessing.
The renaming exercise is likely to be an effort to make people more aware of the company’s multitude of hotspots. By bearing the same name as the Internet you get at home, I imagine BT thinks that Wi-Fi in places like Starbucks will stick in the mind a little better.
BT OpenZone was the name that referred to BT’s network of hotspots, while Fon sees customers piggyback on home-based connections, with routers broadcasting two signals — an encrypted one for the subscriber, and one that’s accessible to other Fon customers.
Both services let BT customers use Wi-Fi when out an about at no extra charge. BT boasts that it has six million hotspots in more than 100 countries, with more than a billion minutes spent on the company’s Wi-Fi in the last three months.
BT was in the news several months ago when its Infinity broadband adverts were banned, with the Advertising Standards Agency concluding that BT’s speed claims were unsubstantiated. It’s not all bad news though — earlier this year BT boosted its Infinity speeds to 76Mbps at no cost.
BT is also the most recent UK ISP to join the Pirate Bay ban following a High Court ruling, though it seems the blockade may already have been broken.
BT released some interesting stats along with the name change — including the fact that 18 per cent of Wi-Fi connections occurred at the same time as eating and drinking. I hope that comes from solitary coffee shop email checking and not folks rudely checking their phones during dinner.
