What if while you were Skypeing with relatives in Australia, you could borrow unused bandwidth from your neighbors, at bedtime, to make your own broadband connection faster and stronger?
In Barcelona, Telefonica's research and development team has been trying to address this very issue. The solution they've come up with is BeWifi, a technology that pools bandwidth from local Wi-Fi routers to boost the connection of users who happen to be online at that very moment.
Telefonica began exploring the idea, without making any changes to the existing infrastructure, in 2008. “We were investigating the possibilities for implementing peer-to-peer and sharing in this space,” says Pablo Rodriguez, director of Product Innovation and Research.

