Virgin Media To Base a Public Wi-Fi Net On Paying Customers' Routers

Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 25, 2015 @03:43AM from the hopscotch-piggyback dept.

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.

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Re:Opt out by Anonymous Coward · 2015-08-25 03:54 · Score: 5, Informative

Maybe try reading the article
"For those Virgin Media subscribers unhappy with the prospect of sharing their network connection, the company is offering an opt-out setting. Enabling this option however will, quite rightly, prohibit the subscriber from accessing other free WiFi spots – share and share alike etc."
So it works exactly like BT's fon service then. Nothing to see here.