The goal of making wi-fi networks easily accessible to the UK population seems at first take to be a massive challenge, fraught with difficulties such as security concerns, hotspot accessibility and massive potential rollout costs. However, a few years ago some bright minds within BT’s CTO had a simple idea that took seed. The idea was nurtured across the company and has now germinated into the launch of BT FON, working with FON, a Spanish start-up backed by both Google and BT, to create the world’s largest open wireless community.
BT FON will enable BT customers with Total Broadband Options 2 and 3, currently three million UK households, to join the wireless community that allows them to access the internet in other BT community members’ homes or on a FON hot spot deployed on other broadband ISPs in the UK or anywhere in the world, completely free.
In return, as part of the global community of 'Foneros', they just have to agree to share a small portion of their wireless and broadband bandwidth with other members. In addition, BT customers will also have access to more than 2000 BT Openzone sites and the 12 Wireless Cities with a monthly call allowance - in total helping to create a real broadband experience even when away from home.
Pete Smyth, vice president, converged service innovation, led a team at BT's research labs that, two years ago, started work on a project called Open Wi-Fi. It was working on the concept of using people's domestic broadband connections as wireless hotspots to provide potentially mass coverage in homes rather than the more traditional view of dedicated wireless broadcast points, as used by the mobile phone network.
He says: "We recognised at the time that implementing wi-fi networks across the country would be very expensive, in particular to achieve good in building coverage, and what people actually wanted was the ability to get wi-fi access in other people's homes and offices. There was a lot of internal research work looking at the idea because it was quite radical - most wireless coverage starts off by putting base stations on top of a hill and eventually appearing on street corners. This started off by saying let’s just put coverage where people actually live and work.
"While everything looked good on paper, our focus group testing confirmed there were a number of challenges to be overcome before it could come off the drawing board," continues Pete. "The primary concerns were security and, given there are limits on bandwidth and on data usage on broadband connections, we needed to understand whether people would be inclined to share their limited and precious resource particularly if it eats into their monthly Gigabyte limit."
Smyth explains: "Our approach was to design a solution completely different to hotspots as they are today. We partitioned the usage of the visitors from the home users so that there are effectively physically separate channels into the network. The home user can't see the visitor inside the network and vice versa. The traffic is treated entirely separately, so nothing the visitor does impacts on the home user."
He adds: "If there would have been any negative impact on the home user it would completely devalue the proposition and because of BT's focus on trust and security our brand could have been harmed. So separation of traffic is of paramount importance to protect our brand and, more importantly, gives reassurance to the home user that they are secure."
"We also had to ensure that this service did not impact on key broadband services such as BT Vision and BT Fusion. This required sophisticated Quality of Service mechanisms to be implemented. This solved the concerns about 'bandwidth hogging' and data usage, both of which can be controlled separately."
Once the CTO team had the concept design, it approached BT Retail whereupon it was quickly decided to make it part of the BT Total Broadband offering. This would not only provide added value to customers, but also would give BT the opportunity to use the service with other propositions that use the Home Hub wireless infrastructure, such as BT Fusion.
Pete Smyth adds: "It is a very simple concept but complex to implement. We worked closely on the implementation with BT Design and through them with Thomson, our hub supplier, to get the code implemented on the hub itself. BT Retail developed the marketing and propositions with FON. In terms of network platforms, BT Design worked with BT Openzone which has all the assets already in place to host all the roaming traffic, while the home user traffic is carried via the ISP connection. Openzone already has more than 2,000 hotspots but with the launch of BT FON this could increase into hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions."
Striking up a deal with FON, the global community wi-fi group, enabled BT FON to increase significantly the potential number of hotspots, including getting access to FON's international user base. FON benefitted from BT's technology research that enabled a far more secure implementation as well as the prospect of millions of new Foneros in the UK.
BT FON is completely free to members. The commercial benefit to BT, according to Smyth, comes from improved acquisition and retention for BT Total Broadband, with the opportunity to increase the range of revenue opportunities on Fusion and other services coming to market in future. Soon wi-fi cameras, MP3 players, games machines, radios, etc, devices will be common place.
He says: "It is a tremendously compelling economic proposition for the business. It is a perfect fit strategically for BT - taking an existing idea of sharing hotspots, implementing it properly with separation of traffic and looking at how it can add value in terms of broadband to BT Openzone and all our converged products and services."
BT FON's ambition and future is rapid growth, all under the banner of "wi-fi for everyone. I’m in." An appropriate slogan, given the co-operation across many parts of BT that resulted in a market and society changing innovation moving from concept to launch in just two years.