The Register writes about todays announcement:
“It’s disappointing for BT Openzone customers that they will no longer be able to benefit from the convenience of our hotspots – we are disappointed that BT could not reach acceptable commercial terms, though we are certain everyone will understand that our service partners, O2, Orange, AT&T, iPass and many others are happy to do business with The Cloud.”
The thing is, selling WiFi like this was never going to be a good business model. For my money I’d rather back community focussed efforts like FON or support grassroots efforts which will pull apart the dependency on third parties selling WiFi for more than pennies an hour.
We can’t consider muni-Wifi in Northern Ireland because public-funded money should not be used to compete against private companies (except in cases where the privately owned service proposition is really bad) but that’s not to say there shouldn’t be alternatives out there.
I’ve got my hands full at the moment with Digital Circle, Infurious and the other things on my plate. I’ll have to return to UKWifi.net at a later date. There’s more shakeouts to happen as 3G dongles take a bite out of commercial WiFi, mark my words.