BT hotspots

[rov1100]

Recently I have been contacted by BT to sign up to use a local hotspot. They never existed before in our community. At the same time I notice that a local user network is signed up to BT hub. Could it be they are using a BT customers hub to allow others in the vicinity to take advantage?

[ChuckFickens]

http://www.btfon.com/

People who sign up for the BT FON service agree to have a bit of their available bandwidth made public (securely) and in return they get to use any other BT FON hot spot they are near when out and about.

I think it's a great idea, I used to make 1Mb/s available to anyone in range of my wireless for ages and I'm not with BT FON

[sunny-dave]

Chuck - wasn't there some issue about responsibility if someone used your 'crowd-sourced' wifi for dubious purposes?

[ChuckFickens]

From the BT FON point of view that's not an issue, each person has to login to use another hotspot and the traffic is kept separate so anything untoward would be clearly traceable.

From a personal point of view (when I done it).... my job is to lock down networks and filter/block web traffic... the "public" part of my network was heavily content and port filtered. (OK it was against the T&Cs of my Internet account... but que Sera :))

[rov1100]

I don't fully understand. Does it mean by signing up to BTFON what you are doing is making use of someone else's nearby router who has a BT hub. If so what if their router is turned off?

On the other hand if you are using your own router to use BTFON whats the point?