There is the small matter of the Beattie Busy-Body (a.k.a. the BTAgent) that exists in the firmware of all modem/routers supplied by the BT Group plc.
As of yet, there is no public explanation as to what it does . . . so, acting the Devil's Advocate 
, I suggest that the BT Group does not wish to give up its ability to 'snoop' on EUs activities. 
I havent looked into this nor had chance to read the info at the other place (Im mega busy atm and havent even caught up on here with the past few days posts yet), but one thing I do feel worthy of comment is
TR-069.
I certainly dont have time to revisit the subject again, but I will say that several years ago (circa 2005?) I recall having several conversations with an ISP who were at the time considering implementing
TR-069 in supplied routers.
There were several concerns that I had as an end-user such as how secure it was and if it was used to update firmware, if user config changes would be retained - we all know such info is usually lost during a firmware upgrade.
Being the cynic I am, and not just relying on the ISP assurances, I also came home spent a few days doing my own research in order to satisfy myself that I wasn't just being fed the standard marketing hype, that some ISPs were known to do
.
My conclusion was that although I personally would like full control over my own router.... there certainly were many benefits for both the ISP
and the 'average joe-blogs type' user for using TR-069... and
most of my initial fears/worries were unfounded.
I would however like a function for advanced users who wanted to be in control of their own router to be able to opt out of this feature. This is something that is largely not considered as an option especially when it comes to the likes of BT supplied routers :/
TR-069 is normally considered and most likely most well known as the protocol responsible for keeping the router firmware up to date, but there are also many other 'bolt ons' that can be added. For example a few are:-
~ Remotely accessing router config files
~ Getting real time line stats from the router
~ Monitoring router supplied info in a similar way which the advanced user may use SNMP to monitor and access & record their line stats over a period of time.
~ Setting QoS at an ISP level for various protocols/types of traffic.
This (QoS) then leads me on to
BT Fon - perhaps more commonly known as BT wi-fi - which I should imagine is likely to be part of the BTAgent.
BT Fon capability is installed within all of the BT supplied routers such as the Home Hubs and shares part of the EU's available bandwidth to any other BT broadband user who has opted to be part of the wi-fi community. BT proudly claim that something like 4 million of their UK users are sharing part of their bandwidth making BT Fon one of the largest 'free' wi-fi networks available in the world.
Obviously they want they want as many of their users as possible on the BT Fon network, locking down their own supplied routers is one way of doing this. Just how many of BT Broadband customers know that by default they are sharing their bandwidth with anyone wanting to use BT's wifi network. Once youve installed non-BT firmware, or using your own router, then you are no longer sharing your bandwidth with the BT Fon network.
I should imagine that trying to find out exactly what the BT Agent is doing would be very hard to see for any non-BT EU as it would need to connect and authenticate with BT's ACS (servers controlling and running the TR-069 software interface at the other end).
