I was wrong of course, although I didn't realise until it bit me. Note that in the early few days I really had no idea what the icons in the status bar meant. Now that I do, this isn't that hard to spot if you're looking for it. Once you have logged in to BT Openzone once, and this means the secondary login that's normally web based as there is no WEP/WPA security on these, it will log you on automatically ever after.
This now means that every time I wander into the range of a BT Openzone hotspot, the iPhone puts 3G on the back burner and connects to it. So far this has only manifested itself in one way, and this will tend to happen in a busy shopping area likely to have strong 3G and hotspots - My connection will drop from excellent 5 bar 3G coverage running extremely well to a single bar failing WiFi connection.
For you see, BT Openzone for the most part is just some bar or coffee shop's router. I have spent more time than one man should trying to find sweet spots for BT Openzone and never once did I establish which business they were coming from or get 5 bars. They were also frequently unimpressive with 4 bars which normally is enough to sustain high speeds. My theory would be that these hotspots don't actually supply high speeds by design. The minimum of 2MBit/s that a good 3G signal is supposed to supply is in theory far superior to a weak WiFi signal, or a relatively strong one with a hypothetical cap of what felt like about 500KBit/s when downloading podcasts.
Something worse that I think's happening although I haven't confirmed it:
BT did a deal with a technology provider by the name of FON. In short, FON firmware loaded on to the BT Home Hubs and customers allowed to opt in or out of the scheme. Opting in opens a sandboxed Internet (sandboxed away from your home network, nothing else) up to others who have opted in and in return as an opter in you get to use theirs. BT could have been cool about this but must have seen the opportunity to boost the profile of their hotspot network, so the routers now messily broadcast not only the ssid for the "real" router connection and one called "BTFON", but also one called "BT Openzone".
As far as I can tell, an ssid is the only way to differentiate these hotspots, and at any rate it's all devices seem to use, therefore I have a feeling the iPhone will even try to log in to these hot spots, which it has no business doing. From testing at home (I am a BT FON opter-inner - it's a great idea and i've made use of it a lot already - plus realistically where I live nobody's gonna use mine
Solution for BT which certainly won't happen - just use "BT FON" for the FON stuff.
Solution for Apple who never listen anyway - detect a login failure then disconnect from the hotspot. If it's the only one available, drop back to 3G. Simple.
Annoying things that I have to live with for now:
- When I'm going wandering away from home, WiFi needs to be turned off. Easily done.
- Can't use 3G to download Podcasts. No good Podcasts are under 5MB. Dumb limit.
- Can't even download as MP3 through Safari, but I can "stream" it in "Quicktime" - this is the same data I wanted to download, BEING DOWNLOADED. Why not let me save it for later?
I do like the iPhone though. No regrets. I do expect to eventually end up using an Android phone somewhere down the line for flexibility, although I remain aghast at how badly the overall initiative is still being handled. I've lost track of whether the Magic and Hero are the same phone or different phones, and I can't remember which one of them is also called a G2. This is how confused someone who has paid attention has got. It will eventually translate to lost sales.
Of all the long overly technical posts i've had, this has been one of them!
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