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Time Warner Customers Get Free Wi-Fi Hotspots

Posted by Zonk on from the now-to-get-airports-to-agree dept.

Hotspots writes with a link to a BusinessWeek article discussing a new service that Time Warner Cable is offering to its customers. Flying in the face of most business decisions about Wi-Fi availability, Time Cable customers will soon be able to turn their connections into public wireless hotspots. This privilege comes as Time Warner inks a deal with the Spanish startup Fon, which is already operating a similar deal with ISPs in Europe. "For Time Warner Cable, which has 6.6 million broadband subscribers, the move could help protect the company from an exodus as free or cheap municipal wireless becomes more readily available. Fon was founded in Spain in 2005 on the premise that people shouldn't have to pay twice -- once at home, then again in a coffee shop -- for Internet access. At first, the company offered software that let members, called Foneros, turn Wi-Fi routers into shared access points, but it took hours to get up and running."

2 of 113 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why would a home broadband customer by RealSurreal · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Two reasons. One, you get free access to all other Fon wireless APs around the world. Two, you can instead opt to receive part of the revenue your hotspot generates and forego the free access elsewhere.

    That's the theory. In practice, I don't see hotspots in any locations I might want to get access from (because they're nearly all residential and I use wifi hotspots on business) and, for the same reason, I can't see a residential hotspot generating much revenue.

  2. TW not first, see Speakeasy by eefsee · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://www.speakeasy.net/ has allowed this for a long time. Their terms of use actually encourage sharing, and long before FON showed up, Speakeasy facilitated such sharing by finding ways for customers to earn revenue for it. One of the few surviving independent ISPs out there, I think Speakeasy deserves a lot of kudos for their policies. Of course, now that they are Best Buy we'll see how long it all lasts.

    FON is interesting for it's dual network access point. I'm running one right now (in Austria) and it does a fine job. It does seem to suffer a bit when both public and private networks are in use, though. It also "phones home" for regular updates that are outside my control. A few weeks ago one such update killed our ability to pick up Google Mail via SSL/POP. The fixed the bug within a couple weeks, but it is still odd to be running my network with an access point so totally out of my control.