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.

Starbucks offers free WiFi to card carriers

Starbucks through BT Openzone is now offering free WiFi to holders of registered Starbucks cards in any of their participating stores in the UK and Ireland.

Starbucks already offered this in a few flagship stores, but's now been rolled out the the rest of the stores.

Starbucks cards can be picked up from any store and then credit applied to them (up to £100). Drinks can then be purchased using the card. Once the card has been registered (via Starbucks.co.uk site), it can be topped up on-line too. Other benefits are free syrup or extra shots as well as the free WiFi offer.

This is a good thing for people who regularly frequent a store to do some work.