BT FON fail: Telco CHARGES customers for FREE Wi-Fi usage

Telecoms giant BT has admitted charging a number of customers for the traffic racked up by its FON services, which uses a portion of each customer's Wi-Fi connection to provide hotspots accessible to the public. A few weeks ago The Register reported that bungling cops in the grim north of England didn't understand the idea …

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Game Theory

Unless you get compensation for keeping your FON running, your theory is totally correct. Be it moral, or pecuniary compensation. For me, I'd rather get a discount. And if it gets used A LOT, like, 20% of the time or 200GB, I should get my broadband FOR FREE that month. Firing up a torrent should be enough to get free 'net.

Unless it is also throttled to you, and there is no point in deactivating it, since it won't free bandwidth to you.

[Just Enough]

Re: Game Theory

BT know if your FON is enabled or not. If you disable FON on your router, your roaming access to everyone else's FON is revoked.

Fortunately your deep moral failings are very human and very common, so BT have already accounted for them.

[Chad H.]

Re: Game Theory

Which is why you dont disable FON, but disable the wireless. It worked for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Game Theory

How did that work? Fon only applies to the wireless interface. Theres no FON on the wired ports.

So are you SURE?......

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Game Theory

When you disable FON it stops you using it on others systems.

You could enable/disable it every time you left/returned. But that requires a login, and tbh it's nit worth the effort.

Remember, if you use ALL bandwidth whilst at home, it lets you so no bandwidth is available to other FON users. So you lose nothing by leaving it on.

[Haku]

Re: It's tempting to disable the service on your own kit to preserve all that bandwidth for yourself.

FON connection speed test whilst no other network activity: 5mbit down, 12mbit up

FON connection speed test whilst main network saturating download bandwidth: 5mbit down, 12mbit up

The wired download speed went from 8.9 megabytes/s to about 8.4 megabytes/s during the FON speed test. So if you're on fibre like me then you'll hardly notice anyone maxing out a FON's connection download potential, but if you're on ADSL then yes there's a chance you could notice your download rates being quite affected.

[Cynic_999]

Re: Game Theory

On an FTTC connection, my speeds are such that the small percentage that might be lost via the throttled FON makes absolutely no difference to me whatsoever. It is extremely rare that the server I am downloading from can reach even 50% of the 75Mbps download speed that online speed checker sites indicate my connection is attaining.

[Fading]

Free wifi you say.......

TBH the only reason my wifi isn't permanently open is I don't want the neighbours randomly sending stuff to my wireless printer.

[xyz]

mmmmm

My countryside dwelling GF was just gnawing my scroat savagely the other week after having received a "you've nearly used up all your bandwidth" email from BT and I was swearing blind that I was using my 3 data connection (13MB) and had never touched her achingly slow wireless BT POS. (3MB) Now I know.