BT Adds Coffee Hotspots

LONDON -- BT today announced a deal with the Costa coffee chain to bring mobile broadband to five of its City of London shops. Public wireless LAN sites, called BT Openzones, have been installed in the Costa coffee shops as part of a nationwide roll-out of Wi-Fi. BT now has 36 live sites across the UK including hotels, motorway services and shopping centres. BT, with partners Motorola and Nortel Networks, is leading the way in providing a network of live sites for Wi-Fi, which gives business people the ability to carry out high-speed, high-volume working away from the office. The company has also signed an additional agreement with Nortel Networks to provide security solutions for BT Openzone. The company is on schedule to hit its target to provide 70 BT Openzones by the end of December, 400 by June next year and 4,000 by June 2005. The emphasis is on rolling out the service to carefully targeted prime sites, rather than random ones. Pierre Danon, chief executive officer of BT Retail, said: "This is a key element of our vision to connect our customers, wherever they are. In order to achieve our targets for rolling out BT Openzone it is important to develop strong relationships with key high street partners like Costa coffee. We will be working with Costa and other major names to ensure that BT Openzones are available at excellent outlets across the country." British Telecommunications plc (BT)