In reply to a post by samthebam:

The idea is quite simple. The heating boiler has a frost protection that means it starts if the temp falls below 5 degrees. The thermostat can be set to keep the temperature in the house a bit higher. (this was the main reason for installing it).

It also has the benefit if connected to the internet of allowing me to put the heating on a few hours before anyone arrives instead a few hours shivering waiting for it all to heat up once someone arrives.

I have tried using two blackberry phones a 9360 and a 9320. Both hotspot settings were changed to nnever shut off connection and left connected to a charger. Both had the hotspot disconnect after exaclty two hours of inacitivity. If the signal was lost they also shutdown the hotspot. I wanted to find out if this was a network issue that would also occur with a mifi if there was no data traffic using the connection.

Well to test this out I have just switched to 3g and turned my hotspot on, without connecting anything to it. Let's see what happens..!

I'm on Three and using a Samsung Galaxy S3 running the Cyanogenmod firmware

And after three hours and deliberately losing signal the hotspot was still enabled. Success!

I suspect a lot of people wouldn't even know what Mi-Fi was. They would just see the words Wi-Fi and think great. This being said families will likely stream etc in a let out property. Due to this unlimited would be a must.