O2 to WiFi London Olympics

O2 has announced plans to put in place 13,000 WiFi hotspots across London and out to Stratford to cover the London Olympics in 2012.

The company is making deals with local councils to use street furniture (such as lamp posts) to provide the coverage. It's hoping to offer the largest free WiFi network in London, competing with other operators such as The Cloud (bought by Sky) and BT Openzone who operate their own network and have hotspots in every Starbucks store.

The network will require users to go to a landing page which will have localised advertising which O2 hope to recover costs through.

O2 will also use the network to off-load data traffic from their mobile network. Though WiFi can be used to cover large areas, it's not really designed for that purpose and can suffer from congestion when many WiFi networks co-exist.