Virgin Media Starts Turning Customer Routers Into Public Wi-Fi Hotspots (arstechnica.co.uk)

UK ISP Virgin Media is expanding its public Wi-Fi network by co-opting customers' home routers as hotspots. Only the most recent router design (the SuperHub v3) will be recruited at first, and customers can opt-out from the program if they wish. Virgin says the change will have "no impact on customers" because affected homes will be allocated extra bandwidth. ArsTechnica offers more context: A little background: a couple of years ago, Virgin Media started trialling a public Wi-Fi service very similar to "BT Wi-Fi with FON," where residential BT customers have their routers turned into hotspots. For some reason the broad rollout of Virgin's service was delayed until now. There are some curious differences between BT and Virgin Media's approach, though. For starters, it seems only Virgin Media customers will have access to this nationwide Wi-Fi network; BT grants free access to BT customers, but non-customers can pay for access ($5 per hour). The owner of that subverted hotspot doesn't get any of the money, of course. Furthermore, while BT customers must share their ADSL or VDSL bandwidth with any public Wi-Fi users, Virgin Media promises that "your home network is completely separate from Virgin Media WiFi traffic, meaning the broadband connection you pay for is exclusively yours, and just as secure."

Comments

Too late

[religionofpeas]

4G is now good enough that it's just not worth the hassle of connecting to unreliable WiFi hotspots, and losing connection every time you go out of range. Do they even support seamless connection handover as you walk down the street ?

Virgin just sued the NHS too.

[hughbar]

Apologies to US readers, but Virgin are busy suing our health service: http://healthcaretimes.co.uk/v... so I'm boycotting anything that has the Virgin label, airlines, sport, fibre etc. etc.

This particular thing is ridiculous, invasive and potentially full of infosec/legal problems too. Just don't.