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Virgin Media To Base a Public Wi-Fi Net On Paying Customers' Routers
An anonymous reader writes with a story that Virgin Media "announced this month its plans to roll out a free public WiFi network this autumn, using subscribers' personal routers and existing infrastructure to distribute the service across UK cities." And while regular customers' routers are to be the basis of the new network, the publicly viewable overlay would operate over "a completely separate connection," and the company claims subscribers' performance will not be hindered. Why, then, would customers bother to pay? For one thing, because the free version is slow: 0.5Mbps, vs. 10Mbps for Virgin's customers.
With the BT one, if you enable it on their router and then swap for your own router, your access remains. Sssshhhh
I may be wrong, but what it looks like to me is: if you're a Virgin customer and you don't opt out you get to use the network at 10Mbps. If you're not a virgin customer or you opt out (because really, how are they going to be able to tell that random mobile device X belongs to an opted-out virgin user and not a random member of the public?) you're limited to the 0.5Mbps rate.