Virgin Media are looking into offering a free public wi-fi service to cover London and be a firm rival to BT’s Openzone network.
According to Neil Berkett, the Chief Executive of Virgin Media, they are in “quite advanced negotiations” with London councils about the service which could potentially be launched in the not too distant future.
This free London WiFi service from Virgin Media will offer everyone a 0.5Mb broadband connection and to Virgin Media customers this will be available up to 10Mb. BT’s Openzone network charges users up to £5.99 for a 90 minutes browsing and is only free to BT broadband customers. It is also only able to bring broadband speeds “up to” 8Mb depending on how close t0 one of the hotspots the user is.
It is likely that the network will cost Virgin Media a few million pounds and it is considered by the company as a “punt”.
Mr Berkett also said:
“there is a gap that is increasingly occurring between consumers’ need for data outside the home and what they can get on 3G”
By offering free public wifi this will help to bridge the gap as more and more people access the internet on the move mainly via smartphone devices.
The Cloud has around 22,ooo WiFi access points across Europe and allows users to connect to a public WiFi hotspot away from the home. Sky Broadband will most likely be looking to offer their customers free access to the WiFi hotspots when they take out a broadband package in much the same way that BT currently does with their customers.