>The benefit for people is that they can get Wi-fi in many places — free for BT customers, and a small fee for others. I subscribed to a BT Openreach broadband

>The benefit for people is that they can get Wi-fi in many places — free for BT customers, and a small fee for others. I subscribed to a BT Openreach broadband product, a few years ago, in personal capacity. The service you are describing is called BT WiFi, after being rebranded. For residential customers, it is enabled by default i.e. an opt-out feature, as you have noted. Once you manage to find a way to disable it, you lose the 'benefits'. I found the feature to be extremely disconcerting, especially relating to a pattern of random parked vehicles and people loitering around residential premises at various times of the day, essentially to leech bandwidth off my connection. It would seem that the ISP supplied router (HH6) was designed to create a splintered guest/public WiFi over a VPN. Although the matter of anonymity and liability was of great concern. However, I did not pursue it any further, due to numerous red flags, relating to degradation in QoS and security; latency, contention, poor signal, connection logs with dubious entries etc. It felt prudent to cut loose, rather than justify any perceived benefits. To stay on the point, I am not sure if the Sidewalk branding will travel well long-term, might as well drop the facade and call it: Amazon Shodan. https://fon.com/bt-wifi-with-fon-rebranding/ https://fon.com/bt-wifi-with-fon-rebranding/