Sky opens up free WiFi to Unlimited punters

Sky have started to e-mail customers on their 'Unlimited' (top tier DSL service on their own LLU network) and 'Connect' (their offnet 'up to' 8Mb service which runs off BT Wholesale's network) to invite them to register for free unlimited access to The Cloud, their WiFI Hotspot service.
The move is clearly a 2-pronged one:

1. To have as many customers as possible on their 'free' service to upgrade to the £7.50 per month 'Unlimited' offering (which is clearly in their interest as they are paying BT Openreach for the rental of the lines while getting limited additional income from the customers - not to mention the usage cap on the 'free' offering being 2GB per month, compared to the 17GB per month that the average UK broadband user consumes)
2. A defensive measure against BT, who heavily promote the free WiFi Hotspot access that their customers have access to - mainly as a result of the FON community they have built which makes available 0.5Mb of dedicated bandwidth from each of their customers' Home Hubs (unless they opt out of it)

The offering should fully launch shortly across the 8,000 hotspots that Sky have deployed (which is to grow to 10,000) in places like coffee shops, restaurants and in the Square Mile of the City of London.

As with Sky Go, you can expect that an advertising campaign will follow which showcases their content assets and focuses on live sports viewing in particular - with remote access to their significant content library being a massive factor in them buying The Cloud in the first place.

Customers can use their Sky username and password to access the service and the info page they have linked to from their e-mail campaign can be found here. Interestingly customers can register up to 6 devices for The Cloud - but only two for Sky Go.