UK mobile operator O2 has expanded wifi coverage for its customers by including access to BT Openzone hotspots for the first time.

Under the deal, O2 will include an additional 3,000 hotspots in its unlimited wifi bundle that comes as part of the company’s basic mobile broadband tariff.

To date, O2 users have had access to around 5,000 hotspots in the UK provided by The Cloud. Although O2 iPhone users have had access to BT Openzone as part of the data bundled that comes with the Apple gadget for some time.

The extension of company’s wifi offering this week is accompanied by the launch of a updated mobile broadband connection manger dashboard, which finally includes a user friendly way of keeping track of your data usage.

Staff at telecoms.com have been assessing the validity of mobile broadband as a fixed line replacement over the past few weeks, and while we were impressed with the speeds and latency of O2’s offering, the dashboard was clunky and difficult to use. So much so that we’ve been using 3’s dashboard, which does a much better job, to handle an O2 connection. Although the O2 update will feature alerts when the data usage has nearly expired, which is a step in the right direction.