O2 quietly cans gratis Cloud Wi-Fi connectivity
Own-brand hotspots offered instead
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O2 has quietly dropped The Cloud from the list of Wi-Fi hotspot aggregators it grants its mobile customers free access to.
Until the start of the month, O2 customers could access the internet through The Cloud's many WLANs. Now, however, only BT Openzone and O2's own O2 WiFi hotspots are included for free.
Punters tell us that O2 didn't let its customers know about the change. Fortunately, details of the change are available tucked away on its support website. Others O2 customers received texts, they tell us.
The Cloud claims to have around 6500 hotspots across the UK. O2 Wi-Fi is shooting for 14,000 by 2013, and the move suggests the operator simply wants to shift its punters onto its own network rather than one it no doubt has to pay The Cloud to use.
BT claims its Openzone chain of hotspots is present at more than 3.5m sites. ®
Thanks to Ben for the tip
COMMENTS
Definitely got a text
I got a text last week from O2 informing me of this. Not sure what the percentage of customers that didn't are, but some people definitely did get prior notification. In fact, I seem to recall getting a notification before Christmas from O2 about this happening as well.
BT 'ClosedZone' more like
Spot on - with so many businesses using O2 broadband but not allowing people to use the Openzone 'free' function (as is their right) its a royal PITA when your phone is always having to connect to what it thunks is an available Openzone connction when 9/10 times in London its not open..
I would rather O2 took away Openzone and lef the Cloud alone.
Openzone should have used different network names for the public PAYG variety and the O2 'its in the bundle' sort. But that would be too simple I guess.
Yep, I definitely got both text messages about this too.. It's a shame really, as The Cloud hotspots are much faster than the BT ones. :(
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