Yesterday BT, who is a fixed and mobile operator who owns its fixed network and resells GSM/3G services made an announcement that explains why it makes sense for BT, SFR, Zon and many other operators to team up with Fon. As the review that I quote says:
£15.65pm is all it now takes to secure an 8Mbit home connection plus a 7.2Mbit HSDPA capable dongle with 1GB monthly data allowance. BT claims the combo provides savings of more than £125 per year compared to current alternatives from the likes of Vodafone and Orange and from my calculations (let me know if you find out differently) that seems about right.
Now how is it that BT can offer such an amazing deal in which for only around $20 per month it can offer both ADSL and HSDPA? The answer is thanks to the amazing WiFi network that it built together with Fon that is known as BT Fon. HSDPA is good but it has two drawbacks, it is slower than WiFi and it comes with throughput limitations. So BT has developed a great technology whereby its USB dongles look for WiFi first and then HSDPA. And because together with us now BT has hundreds of thousands of WiFi points chances are that WiFi will be mostly available except situations in which the customer is in a car or somewhere away from densely populated areas. BT has made this a part of its margin calculations and it can therefore offers that are so much cheaper than Vodafone and Orange. 
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Charbax on May 4, 2009 ·
So does the HSDPA dongle have WiFi sniffing built-in as well? Or how does BT automate it so that it looks for WiFi on BT Fon network first or somehow loads BT Fon map over HSDPA to tell the user to move a little to get that faster and cheaper WiFi bandwidth?
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andy w on April 28, 2009 ·
I think this is amazing and shows fantastic foresight from BT’s part. Congratulations to everyone at Fon!