In return, customers will be able to use all the other FON hotspots free of charge, including 190,000 worldwide, and will form what FON says will be the world’s largest Wi-Fi community. Though this will tend to restrict them to residential areas, they will also be able to use the company’s existing hotspot network BT Openzone, including 12 wireless cities.

FON COO Diego Cabezudo told Computer Business Review that it is in talks with other incumbents in a developments that could soon make Wi-Fi connections ubiquitous, to add to the number of municipal Wi-Fi systems that are currently being installed.

Madrid, Spain-based FON, which has been funded by Google and Skype, has until now found that its cooperative approach has limited it to partnership with second-tier operators such as Time Warner Cable in the US. But the endorsement of BT, which will invest an unspecified sum in FON and appoint a member to the board, suggests it could play a significant part in the spread of connectivity and the relatively high fees charged by mobile carriers for internet connections.

Though its principal market will be consumers, it will also be attractive to SMEs looking for mobile connections for a minimal outlay.

Customers will be offered an open Wi-Fi system, developed by FON and BT’s research labs, which will enable them to open up a separate secure channel on their wireless router.

One advantage that BT has in the Wi-Fi market is that it without a wireless arm, it is under no pressure to protect traditional revenue from cheaper technologies. Wireless carriers have been known to disable Wi-Fi connections from recent mobile handsets to prevent a loss of revenue.

Gavin Patterson, BT Group managing director, Consumer, said: We have built a public Wi-Fi network and 12 wireless cities already, but today we are saying to customers, let’s build a Wi-Fi community together, which covers everywhere and serves everyone.

FON’s Founder and CEO Martin Varsavsky said that from the beginning, FON users believed in the concept of sharing and in peoples’ ability to participate in building something important that would benefit everyone. With BT FON, those beliefs have proved to be well-founded, he said.

Our View

BT and FON are very different organizations. But then the most aggressive capitalist companies such as IBM have come to embrace the open source community, which stands for totally different values. In fact, their interests can coincide. By offering widespread Wi-Fi connectivity, BT will sell more broadband connections. It also puts rivals such as Orange on the spot because Wi-Fi threatens mobile revenue. It is a clever move that will probably be followed by more broadband providers.