From the Washington Post article:

“What Aereo is doing to bring broadcast signals to its customers is interesting,” Time Warner Cable chief executive Glenn Britt said in an interview with The Washington Post. “If it is found legal, we could conceivably use similar technology.”

That’s a big admission from Britt, and illustrates both how rapidly the internet is changing the television industry. But what would be an even bigger admission would be if Britt would consider delivering that public broadcast package beyond its existing subscriber base.

A modest proposal

In short, would Britt be willing to break the unspoken agreement that has kept the telcos and cable providers from infringing on each other’s turfs even as IP technology has made it possible for them to deliver their TV packages over the top?

If Time Warner Cable were to implement an Aereo-like business model and offer it to anyone, it might hurt Aereo but it would set off a war between the telcos and cable companies to deliver their services over the top. In many cases, the technology isn’t stopping this revolution, but the business implications would give them pause.

If Comcast’s Xfinity service were available everywhere and so were Verizon’s FiOS packages, then pay TV will have been decoupled from the entwork. All you would be left with are dumb pipes and whole lot of companies offering to provide the same channels of television. Would we need 20 “premium cable offerings?”

My hunch is no, which would have trickle down effects on the money the networks make as well as hasten the rise of a la carte pay TV packages, or even simply paying for a show. However, all of this speculation is premature as Britt cushioned his statements by telling the Washington Post that his company is only watching Aereo’s legal battle and that it doesn’t have concrete plans.

Taking action on this sort of talk would hugely piss off the broadcasters that own some of the channels that Time Warner Cable depends on to keep its subscribers happy, and may just be a feint in the ongoing fight between cable providers and content companies about retransmission fees.

Back in the real world

But Britt is clearly a fan of shaking things up. Unlike many ISPs that view Netflix as a threat to their triple play bundle, Time Warner Cable sends out advertisements touting Netflix as a reason to upgrade broadband speeds. He’s also letting consumers stream live TV to their Roku boxes with a Time Warner Subscription (that might come in handy should it elect to make an Aereo-style over the top offering). And he’s also been more vocal about the need for more flexible packages of channels for consumers.

He reiterated that to the Washington Post:

“The structure needs more flexibility,” Britt said. A customer shouldn’t have to pay for less popular channels like VH1 Honors in order to get Nick Jr. and MTV. “There are fellow citizens who are struggling financially and can’t afford large programming packages. We want the ability to offer those customers smaller, more affordable packages.”

It’s better to keep a customer paying you something, rather than decamping because they don’t want to pay for a $150 cable bill. Britt seems to get that, and wants to find a middle ground before the internet and over the top TV offerings take that ground out from under his feet. I wonder if he’s willing to take it even further.

That “world’s leading” tag is debatable, as China Telecom claims more than 90 million broadband subscribers, but this is nonetheless a big deal, taking the combined operation way past the likes of Comcast (18.7 million subscribers). The operation will focus on “the strongest and most strategic markets in Europe”, delivering the triple-play hit of broadband, telephony and digital TV while also pushing mobility and B2B products.

Liberty Global CEO Mike Fries said in a statement:

“Adding Virgin Media to our large and growing European operations is a natural extension of the value creation strategy we’ve been successfully using for over seven years.

“Virgin Media will add significant scale and a first-class management team in Europe’s largest and most dynamic media and communications market [the UK]. After the deal, roughly 80 percent of Liberty Global’s revenue will come from just five attractive and strong countries — the UK, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands.”

Europe is such a strong focus for the combined company that Liberty Global will “redomicile” from Delaware to the UK, although its headquarters will stay put. The company will continue to be Nasdaq-listed, although it may list on a European stock exchange as well. Virgin will hang onto its brand.

The implications of this deal could be wide-ranging. It will certainly bolster Virgin’s chances in the UK pay TV market against Rupert Murdoch and BSkyB.

Virgin also has a very good hybrid cable/fibre broadband network in the UK that was created out of the merger of NTL and Telewest half a dozen years ago. John Malone’s Liberty, previously a major shareholder in Telewest, had itself tried and failed to execute such a merger, so today’s deal is the culmination of a long-term ambition.

At the same time, it also seems to be about taking advantage of Virgin Media’s tax losses and low interest rates, according to sources referred to by the Financial Times.

The telecom gear maker offered up its fifth annual assessment of future broadband growth on fixed, managed and wireless networks around the world Wednesday. And to no one’s surprise, as individuals, households and countries we’re just going to keep boosting our broadband use.

Around the world last year people generated 30.7 exabytes of data per month from a total of 10.3 billion connections. That’s a lot until you compare it to Cisco’s projections of the world generating roughly 110 exabytes per month from 18.9 billion connections. That’s a ton of growth, so what do the stats really tell us?

More web use, more users and more connected devices.

Broadly it tells us the growth comes from existing users doing more online while toting more devices, and also from people around the world without connections today who are joining the World Wide Web. Cisco estimates that on average, individuals generated an average of 11.5 gigabytes of data per month. That’s a lot until you compare it to Cisco’s projections of an individual consuming an average of 32.3 GB per month. And as the chart below shows, we’ll be online and so will our vehicles and homes.

Oh, the devices you will have!

Part of what will keep us hooked on the web is a better experience thanks to faster speeds. Global web speeds will rise from 9 Mbps to 34 Mbps. Unfortunately, 100 Mbps speeds and fiber to the home will still be a global rarity five years from now. Cisco estimates only 3 percent of web users will have 100 Mbps connections.

We love the web and Wi-Fi, but what about data caps?

With Cisco predicting average household web use reaching 150 GB per month globally in the unspecified future (beyond 2016 is as specific as the spokesperson could get), and given that U.S. residents are predicted to generate the most IP traffic of any country at 22 exabytes a month, Comcast’s 20 percent boost to its data cap this month had better be the first of many inflation-related upgrades. And they had better come a lot faster. It took Comcast 5 years to go from a 250 GB per month cap to the 300 GB per month cap. In five years Cisco expects North American traffic to increase by three-fold (this includes Mexico and Canada).

And even though mobile growth is skyrocketing and will grow 18-fold in the next five years, it’s rising from a smaller base. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi is going to pick up a lot of the mobile network’s slack because of costs, caps and the growing availability of Wi-Fi networks. Cisco estimates that by 2016, over half of the world’s Internet traffic is expected to come from Wi-Fi connections.

We’re going to need a lot more servers, storage and other equipment to both provide content and store all this data we’re sending, creating and consuming. The network is the transport layer for all those bytes, but machines still create and store them. And really, that gear had better be more energy efficient than the stuff we’re using today, or we’re going to run out of plants to power them.

I just can’t get enough.

For those who care to dig in deeper, here’s Cisco’s web site discussing the survey, as well as our stories covering the first VNI report back in 2008 and another one in 2010. Cisco isn’t doing all that badly when estimating traffic data. In the initial 2007 release of the forecast, Cisco says it projected an overall IP traffic volume of 28.4 exabytes per month for 2011. The actual volume in 2011 was 30.7 exabytes per month, or about 7 percent higher than was projected five years ago.

Our broadband networks are driving our computing, our economy and even our scientific discoveries. Cisco is showing us exactly how big that network is likely to become. It’s pretty awesome.

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Now that Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Verizon have kicked off  the latest round of quarterly earnings reports by multi-channel operators late last month — a series that continues Wednesday when Comcast releases its first-quarter numbers — a case can be made that the cable industry has a better future in providing broadband services rather than TV/video bundles. And they have Netflix and YouTube to thank for that.

This notion has picked up stream recently, with research company Sandvine releasing data last week showing that streaming on Netflix accounts for 29 percent of broadband usage over fixed networks during peak hours (8:15 p.m. – 10:45 p.m.), up 4 percent from last year. YouTube is second in line, accounting for 12.2 percent, up nearly 2.5 percent.

Overall, Sandvine found that “real-time entertainment” accounts for 58 percent of peak  fixed-network traffic, up from 49.2 percent a year ago (see chart). Overall, median U.S. broadband usage has more than doubled over the last year to more than 10 gigabytes per month per household.

“The faster bandwidth consumption escalates, the better the cable industry is positioned,” wrote BTIG Research’s noted media technology analyst, Richard Greenfield, on his blog Tuesday. “With an increasing number of IP-enabled devices ‘on net’ in the home all the time, consumers will demand increasingly robust bandwidth and be willing to pay for it.”

For the last several years, cable companies have been losing multi-channel video subscribers to telco-based service providers. But as Greenfield also pointed out, with 214,000 net subscriber additions for high-speed data services in the first quarter, Time Warner Cable had more broadband growth than Verizon and AT&T combined.

The latter two companies are experiencing subscriber losses in the increasingly uncompetitive DSL sector. And their wireless broadband products don’t offer enough bandwidth to keep up with demand, Greenfield added. Neither AT&T or Verizon offers a cap as big as 10 GB a month, for example.

“While the broadband speeds delivered by wireless companies have notably improved, bandwidth caps mitigate the risk of wireless devices replacing in-home fixed broadband connections,” he wrote.

With escalating programming costs and stagnant revenue growth limiting the margins of video services, the performance of Comcast’s broadband services will undoubtedly gather close scrutiny by investors Wednesday.

Time Warner Cable’s revenue for residential video services rose only 2 percent to $2.7 billion, for instance, while revenue for residential broadband was up nearly 10 percent to $1.2 billion.

Unfortunately, Congress didn’t do all of that. It danced around the problems of pipe owners also owning content providers and pay TV distribution businesses. It didn’t ask about caps on broadband and how that serves the interests of the pay TV business, and despite the fact that network neutrality was brought up several times and was cited by Barry Diller, the chairman of IAC, and Amazon’s public policy lead Paul Misener, the way that Comcast is sidestepping network neutrality by not counting content streamed over the Xbox against its data cap was never mentioned.

So what was the Senate’s tangent today?

Netflix is 27.6 percent of broadband traffic in the U.S. according to a new report from Sandvine.

Instead the call during the hearing was for a rewrite of the 1996 Telecoms Act, which deregulated the telecommunications agency, helped establish the rules that let the Internet grow and brought about the rise of competitive local exchange carriers. But in an election year, such a rewrite seems unlikely, and frankly, worrisome given the power that ISPs and content companies have in Washington at the moment. Instead, the law that might make headway is the The Next Generation Television Marketplace Act, which was proposed in December, and was the basis for the hearing today.

The proposed act deals primarily with deregulating the broadcast industry to eliminate some required coverage mandates and to allow broadcasters to negotiate retransmission rates with pay TV providers just like cable programmers such as ESPN or AMC do. As a consumer this would likely lead to higher cable costs and the loss of public interest programming. The fundamental question that should be asked with regard to this legislation is whether or not the broadcasters’ access to public airwaves means they should have limits set upon them to serve the public interest? (The FCC gives them their airwaves in exchange for following certain rules and carrying certain types of programming.)

But that wasn’t really the focus of the hearing, despite a few questions asked of Diller, who is an investor in Aero, one of the most interesting startups to come out of the convergence of the web and television. Aereo, provides access via the web to over the air content for a fee. Consumers pay a set amount each month and then can get access to over the air television from any device. The value-add is that consumers who can’t receive the over-the-air signals from their broadcaster can still get access to the programming, can record it for later consumption and can get it on any device. Of course, it’s being sued.

So what is the real issue?

The hearing did clarify a fundamental issue about both television and broadband. The two are now intertwined, so from a regulatory perspective the fight will now be about who holds the power in terms of relationships with consumers and in terms of their relationships with content companies. On one side, we have the broadcast industry and the ISPs, which also own broadband and in many cases pay TV service access. On the other are the startups and online behemoths that want to deliver TV to the consumer when and where they want it using a variety of business models. In the middle are content creators trying to walk the line between finding an audience today and finding one tomorrow. And consumers just want to pay for exactly what they want, when they want it without spending money on superfluous channels or content.

As Barry Diller testified, the Internet is ready to provide a new platform for content distribution but the interests of pay TV providers and content companies that are linked to distribution companies also want to interfere with how content is accessed. He said eliminating the distribution companies as middlemen given content creators more creative freedom and they wouldn’t have to sign away as many of their rights, adding,”How can that not be in the public interest?”

When Blair Westlake, Corporate VP, Media & Entertainment Group at Microsoft explained that he saw TV changing more in the past 18 months than it had in the last five years, he focused on some of the cool things Microsoft is doing with the Children’s Workshop, the producers of Sesame Street. He described children of the future interacting with the characters using the Kinect and even seeing themselves onscreen. This is cool, but sidesteps some of the issues the hearing didn’t really delve into.

Where Congress, and regulators must focus.

The Internet has become a platform for services and TV is just one of those services. We need to start thinking about TV in terms of who can deliver it at a transport layer (the pipes), how it gets delivered (via a pay TV subscription, YouTube channels, Netflix subscriptions) and where the value is and who gets to charge for that.

There is no question that the content is valuable. There is also no question that consumers find value in access that content online from any device whenever they want as Susan Whiting, vice chairman of Nielsen, testified.

So Congress should focus on who will capture the value of the new means of delivering TV, and whether or not certain players have an advantage that Congress or the FCC should investigate. Many of the Senators asking questions have come pretty far by recognizing the importance of broadband access when thinking about the future of TV.

Some questions Washington should be asking

Here are a few questions they can — and should — ask to take the conversation further:

• If broadband is a platform for TV, should broadband providers also be TV distribution providers and content companies? How can they use that horizontal integration to their advantage? Are monthly data caps a method for them to stymie competition?
• Do deals to provide services to specific devices without counting against a cap sidestep network neutrality?
• Should the dearth of independent broadband providers (those providing the platform only without a pay TV business) concern Congress?
• What rules and regulations does a horizontally integrated broadband/distribution/content player need to follow to preserve access to real competition and inovation? Are the merger conditions associated with Comcast buying NBCU enough?
• Where is the value in the new TV business? Is it content? Access? Distribution?
• What are the most promising new business models that can support the industry?
• How many of those business models will require the end consumer to give up their privacy?

I can think of several more questions, including those related to protecting the rights of content creators in a completely digital world, ensuring that children’s programming meets certain standards or even mandating accessibility for all on the Internet. However, to ask these questions requires Congress to view the Internet as not just a new way to communicate and share ideas, but as a new platform that will subsume the older industries of TV, voice communications and publishing and transform them into even richer mediums to share ideas, consume entertainment and even change how we work.

It’s not an adjunct, it’s a replacement. Or it can be, if we prevent the old-line industries that will see some of their lines of businesses replaced by IP technologies from walling up the promise of the web with data caps, friendly deals with certain hardware makers and over-inflated concerns about piracy and content theft.

Congress could help by asking tough questions or doing a real overhaul of the Telecommunications Act with this framework in mind, but I don’t think it’s viewing the web yet through the right lens. It needs to think of the Internet at two levels — the transport mechanism for the bits and the services that ride on top of them. We need a regulatory conversation that recognizes this divide and encourages it.

Reports in the local media say that the country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs is looking to bring in fresh laws that would make service providers responsible for illegal filesharing between those using their networks.

According to Vedomosti.ru, the government is undertaking a consultation on the issue, and will report back towards the end of this month. If it goes ahead, the laws that criminalize the network could hit the statute books later this year.

The ministry is trying to document the “spread of illegal content in the local networks of Internet service providers,” Seralinov Jannat of the Ministry of Internal Affairs told Gazeta.ru.

According to him, each provider runs local file-sharing networks with which they are trying to attract users. Seralinov promised that the criminal penalties for the distribution of pirated movies and pornography to minors will affect not only subscribers, but also ISPs, but did not say how it would work precisely.

As the piece points out, it is the local filesharing networks that many Russian ISPs run that are really under scrutiny — services that officials claim allow subscribers to freely pirate and share material. This is a slightly different argument from cases that have happened in countries all over the world — such as Germany, Australia and elsewhere — which have generally ruled that ISPs are not liable.

In general, those providers accused of assisting infringement have argued that they are merely dumb pipes that push data around without discrimination. But in some countries, such as the U.K., ISPs are being co-opted (against their will) into tracking and punishing those believed to be illegal filesharers.

Still, it’s a significant move for Moscow to be making: Russia is now Europe’s largest internet market, and is growing at a rapid clip — yet still one of the cliches is that it’s a haven for crime and IP infringement of all kinds. Yes, Russia has a high incidence of online crime, and is home to a large cohort of internet fraudsters, plus the fuzzy legality of services like AllofMP3.com, a music download store which caused great consternation because it operated under a very particular interpretation of Russian law that most copyright holders thought was actually illegal.

But this has been changing over the last few years, as the country tries to legitimize itself in the eyes of other nations and organizations like the WTO.

That means the reaction of internet providers will be interesting to watch: will they shut down the offending networks, or make a stand?

The NPD Group put out a survey on Tuesday suggesting that pay-TV rates could hit $200 by 2020 from an average rate of $86 per month now. The analysts at NPD credit rising content-licensing fees and the average 6 percent rate increase that cable companies jam down users’ throats each year. Check out the expected rise in this graph.

The big threat to cable is broadband

But the idea of paying $200 in eight years, or even $123 in three years, seems like insanity for most consumers. It also seems like insanity for the cable companies to attempt, given how rising cable costs amid grim economic times have led folks to cut the cord. But is demand for cable inelastic? The NPD report notes that 16 percent of U.S. households don’t have pay-TV service. This means 84 percent do — a huge success for the industry. But can it last? From the NPD report:

“As pay-TV costs rise and consumers’ spending power stays flat, the traditional affiliate-fee business model for pay-TV companies appears to be unsustainable in the long term,” said Keith Nissen, research director for The NPD Group. “Much-needed structural changes to the pay-TV industry will not happen quickly or easily; however, the emerging competition between S-VOD and premium-TV suppliers might be the spark that ignites the necessary business-model transformation of the pay-TV industry.”

That business-model transformation is already occurring, but the end result isn’t likely to be exactly the à la carte, pay-for-channels-you-want and watch-it-when-you-want model that many of us in the Web world are hoping for. Instead, we are witnessing the first steps toward the creation of a combined pay-TV and broadband bundle that gives consumers most of the TV they want on demand and encourages them to avoid going to the outside Web.

Cable sees the threat, but consumers are missing the opportunity

Those days of watching hours of Netflix together may soon end.

If done quickly, consumers, who are just discovering how pleasant (and economical) it can be to watch TV via broadband using over-the-top services such as Netflix or Hulu, will be lulled back into complacency and will still view their pay-TV and broadband subscriptions as necessary. So far, research this week from the Leichtman Research Group notes that 79 percent of Netflix Watch Instantly consumers use it to watch movies and television shows on a TV set, but in the past six months only .1 percent of survey respondents dropped cable because they found all the content they wanted online.

Today a big reason why people don’t cut the cord is the lack of content, such as live sports programming, as well as some people experiencing problems in getting broadcast content that should be free. This can be an issue with not being able to get the over-the-air signal clearly inside a home, or it can also be a result of the cable companies’ interfering with technology that can make it easier. And finally, consumers still want the convenience of one place to go for all of their television. According to NPD, 59 percent of pay-TV subscribers preferred having one single provider for their pay-TV services, compared with 21 percent who desired multiple providers and 21 percent who expressed no preference.

And only 20 percent told NPD they would consider going over the top if they could access their favorite shows online. This may be the case today, but if pay-TV subs reach $200 or even $123, those sentiments may change. The lure of convenience may not be enough if the content is available and people can access it without going over some set broadband cap. And it appears that cable companies, especially Comcast, are preparing for that future today.

Creating the TV walled garden

TiVo, the original TV disrupter, said yesterday it would offer Comcast’s Xfinity video-on-demand service via its boxes for users in San Francisco. A Comcast spokesman called the plan a pilot and confirmed that the Xfinity content watched via TiVo wouldn’t count against a user’s broadband cap. Comcast is offering the same arguments that it made in deciding to exempt content streamed over the Xbox, namely that this content never leaves its private network to travel over the public Internet.

The FCC left that loophole open in its network neutrality ruling, as I explained in a previous post, but as media watchdog Dwayne Winseck notes, public-interest groups and the FCC may have a chance to stop the practice using the merger conditions associated with the Comcast NBC-U deal. But the political will to enforce those conditions and recognize the potential for creating a shadow Internet has to be in place at the FCC and in the government (or courts) in general.

So by offering the cap as a stick to prevent over-the-top streaming from disrupting pay TV and the carrot of exempt television content from the Xfinity service, Comcast is well on its way to creating a safe haven inside its network to keep subscribers complacent and making the idea of leaving to grab content elsewhere a risky proposition: If you go over the cap too often, you get cut off. And if the fears of a cap don’t stop people, the cable industry is also tied pretty closely with content providers via ownership, as Comcast owns NBC-U, or via the relationships forged by access to their subscribers (see this awesome post from the Economist on why HBO isn’t going to abandon the cable guys and go over the top).

So the question for TV consumers is, Do you keep paying $86 today for access to a walled garden of really good content that will likely continue to rise in cost? Or do you go outside the walled garden and scramble to get your regular shows while fighting the caps and agreements that will eventually make the world outside the walled garden inhospitable for a TV lover? And the bigger question is whether or not the FCC or anyone in Washington is watching this play out and plans to help the consumers by taking action. Otherwise $200 cable doesn’t make the cable guys stupid. It makes them brilliant.

Walled Garden image courtesy of Flickr user sportsilliterate

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For $12 a month, Aereo is promising New Yorkers access to a remote dime-sized antenna that will stream broadcast networks live over broadband across devices, along with storage space on a cloud-based DVR. The company is housing thousands of the HD-quality antennas in data centers. The company has raised $20.5 million and is slated to launch as an invitation-only service in New York March 14. Fox (NSDQ: NWS), Univision and PBS are already suing to stop it.

Diller is a summa-cum-laude graduate of the old school who in another life might well have been one of the execs lining up against the idea of a service that bypasses cable and satellite to deliver broadcast networks to consumers. Now he’s the one claiming broadcasters “forgot a longtime ago” how they got a free broadcast license in the first place. “They have the right to say where and when they want programming they own to be displayed,” he admits. But the man who created Fox contends they don’t have the right to insist on intermediaries they approve as the conduit to consumers. “I don’t think it’s on the side of settled law or on the side of the angels.”

When they ask for retransmission fees to allow Aereo to operate, Diller says he tells them, “When you get Radio Shack to pay you a slice of profit for selling an aerial, we’ll pay you.”

Diller argues that Aereo avoids legal issues others have faced by leasing the antenna to consumers, who then “control” it via devices they already own. A win in court — not the most likely of outcomes given how the courts have reacted so far to efforts to stream networks without agreements — doesn’t guarantee a business win. During the on-stage interview with CNN’s Ali Velshi, Diller enthused about the idea but added, “We don’t know yet. We don’t know anybody’s going to want to do this.”

(To which I’d add, even if enough people in NYC, where broadcast signals can be impossible to receive without third parties, pay to make it work financially in that market, there’s no guarantee it would be viable in other major cities. Those most likely to pay $12 a month for Aereo or something like it are already paying for cable or satellite and think they could save money by mixing broadband broadcast delivery with other offerings like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX), Hulu Plus or ad-supported options.)

This is what Diller calls the essence of the internet: “Push a button and you publish to the world. so long as you have an idea, nothing between you and the consumer. That is a profound change of how media has been for the last 100 years.”

But he doesn’t use his own “button” — ie a Twitter feed. Diller says he regrets not starting with Twitter early on but thinks it’s too late now. That doesn’t stop him from being “very admiring” of Rupert Murdoch, who he sees using Twitter during a difficult time to get away from having his message managed and make his own voice heard.

This article originally appeared in GigaOm.

These t&c interstitials cause problems for many devices too. If you’ve ever used a Starbucks (NSDQ: SBUX) WiFi connection, your iPhone or Android device will automatically connect to “BT (NYSE: BT) Openzone – Starbucks” whenever you walk near a Starbucks outlet – and then become entirely connectionless: since any request that’s going on from the phone will be rediverted to the login page until you get the phone out of your pocket, load the browser up, and click the big green button on the BT Openzone page that says “Connect”.

Further – this can’t go on. These repeated requests from devices in everyones’ pockets are now actually causing a fair amount of load on the registration servers; often, it’s difficult to get to the page that contains the t&cs, but once you’ve done that, the WiFi speeds by. And this problem will only get worse.

So, who’s the only company in the UK that are doing free WiFi right?

Tesco.

Why are Tesco offering free WiFi? Potentially, to enable price comparison checks; or to let me listen to streaming radio, or podcasts, while I slowly amble around the store. And it probably doesn’t cost them anything, since they presumably already need WiFi for their stock-checking or home grocery pickers.

So, pop into your local Tesco Extra store (that’s the big ones) and you’ll spot the Tesco free WiFi in there. Connect to it, and it asks for your Clubcard number as a method of authentication – it’s a free service to Clubcard users only – and accepting the terms and conditions. And then you’re connected… forever.

Tesco store the MAC address of your WiFi device against your personal details. They know who you are from your Clubcard account; and they know you’ve accepted the t&c for the free WiFi. So, the next time you go into Tesco, your device will automatically connect to the free WiFi and connect to the proper internet without requiring you to agree the t&cs again. Perfect.

That is how to do free WiFi. Whether you’re Starbucks, The Cloud, Paragon, or any of the other free WiFi providers – please do take note.

Or, better, remove the t&cs entirely.

This article originally appeared in Media UK.