Chris Clark, BT wireless broadband chief executive, said that BT was keen to give its Wi-Fi customers access to more hot spots, and suggested that a deal with T-Mobile was imminent.
"There are only three large-scale operators in the UK: BT, The Cloud -- who we already have a deal with -- and T-Mobile," said Clark. "The other operators are important, but they are niche."
"Our focus is to get the scale operators working together," Clark said, in an interview in which he also talked about BT's Wi-Fi price cuts.
BT's roaming agreement with The Cloud, the UK's largest Wi-Fi network, gives it access to some 4,000 hot spots. At the last count, T-Mobile had 500 hot spots in locations such as Starbucks coffee shops and Texaco petrol stations.
T-Mobile did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Without roaming deals, a customer on one UK Wi-Fi network has to pay again if they want to use the hot spots of another. Given the high prices levied by some operators, this has been a barrier to wireless take-up.
According to one analyst, it's important that this problem is overcome.
"Simple roaming between Wi-Fi networks is essential. It needs to be like banks' ATM cash machines: ideally, they all interconnect. At a push, two large and well-branded networks can coexist. But fragmentation reduces the overall value and utility of the technology," said Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis.
At present, Openzone customers can use The Cloud's hot spots without incurring any additional fee. Bubley thinks it's important that this remains the case.
"Users might pay extra to roam at a hot spot at Heathrow if they really have to, in the same way they might pay a £1 fee to get cash out of an ATM in a nightclub at 2 a.m. when they're drunk. But in 95 percent of cases, there should be no incremental charge or inconvenience."
Talkback
I tried to go to one of the so called 500 T-Mobile hotspots at Texaco only to find no network avaialble. As for the Cloud large scale network it may be but there are no customers. I think its about time operators started telling us (and the press retported) how many people use their hotspots rather than how many sites they have (but not necessarily live). If you reported average users per hotspot as a measure rather than numbers I think you'd start to get truthful netwroks size reports after all if you say you have 500 and you only have 250 sites your average number of users per site would be half so these netwroks would have to tell the truth. Indeed it would I'm sure make the Cloud look rather silly 2000 sites I doubt they even get 2000 users a month.
I disagree, don't you think it is better when you are the only person at a hotspot and you can use all the bandwith for yourself?