O2 launches free London Wi-Fi service in time for Olympics

O2 has launched the free Wi-Fi it promised to central London visitors and residents in time for the London 2012 Olympics.

The telecoms provider struck a deal at the beginning of the year with Westminster City Council and the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea to fix wireless access points around some of London's busiest areas to support the free Wi-Fi network.

The Wi-Fi covers areas including Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Exhibition Road, and the rollout is supported by an advertising deal O2 has struck with the House of Fraser department store chain, with ads for the brand appearing on the Wi-Fi landing page where users register for the service. The councils have not paid anything towards setting up the network.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson said: "With millions of extra people coming to town for the Games we want to ensure we showcase the capital as the best city in the world to work and visit, and the addition of free Wi-Fi to some of our most popular landmarks is crucial in helping to maintaining that reputation."

Earlier this month O2 suffered a serious national outage to parts of its mobile network.

Meanwhile, this week the UK's largest mobile phone operators claimed they would be able to cope with the expected increase in demand on their networks during the Olympics, thanks to real-time data and more engineers.