Panera Bread Is The Largest Provider Of Free WiFi

ayb11 writes "According to this article, the Panera Bread chain of Bakery/Cafes (think Starbucks that bakes their own bread) is the largest provider of free WiFi in the US. Their web site says, " There are currently 573 Wi-Fi enabled Panera Bread bakery-cafes, from California to Virginia. More are added every day." (Even my retired dad takes his barely-used laptop over there so he can get free refills on coffee.) Their full list of hotspots is here."

Comments

I bet

[Anonymous Coward]

Offering free wifi costs them a lot of dough.

Re:I bet

[buro9]

As puns go they don't baguette much better than that. We can't all have an in-bread ability to come out with such wheaticisms.

I can see how a bakery chain would knead to branch out it's offerings though.

Damn, I thought of another pun but now it's scone!

* Thanks to a few mates for coming up with these truly breadful puns.

Re:I bet

[Kenja]

"Offering free wifi costs them a lot of dough."

But I bet having it makes them some bread.

Re:I bet

[OECD]

Damn, I thought of another pun but now it's scone!

D'OH!

(sorry everyone)

got fibre?

[ackthpt]

A friend was lamenting how overloaded and lagged the local free WiFi was. Lag always put me in mind of a constipated network. Seems a bakery chain would have the fibre thing covered to keep your traffic moving smoothly, inside and out.

"uuuugghhh need more bran"

If only

[krgallagher]

"There are currently 573 Wi-Fi enabled Panera Bread bakery-cafes, from California to Virginia. More are added every day."

If only they served alcohol.

Its not really free

[Shnizzzle]

It's just factored into the prices. Panera is good but pretty pricey. I doubt they would let someone who doesn't order anything just sit in their and use the internet for a prolonged period of time. It's a resturant, not a coffee shop.

Re:Its not really free

[anjrober]

The Panera buy my office has a fireplace section with couches and stuffed chairs expressly to encourage people to lounge all day. I've had coworkers have meetings there and not order anything at all. On Saturday nights they have live music after that continues after people have stopped ordering food. I've seen the same people in there when I bought coffee in the AM and lunch in the PM.

Starbucks of bread?

[athakur999]

think Starbucks that bakes their own bread

So their bread is overpriced and burnt but served by attractive female bakers so you keep coming back?

Well it isn't that expensive

[hsmith]

Companies act like it is a cripling cost, but what $60/month for cable, when customers will use this feature if you have it, it will even draw people to your store. Giving it away for free should bring them more people one would think.

but then again starbucks has such a big customer base that those people don't care what they pay for WiFi as long as they get their mocacappachino that costs $8

St. Louis Bread Company

[Anonymous Coward]

They are still called The St. Louis Bread Company here in St. Louis

Allowed me to stop paying Starbucks/B&Noble

[AnotherEscobar]

Panera's became my home office for 3 months last year. Every day, constant free coffee refills, and plenty of lunch-crowd eye-candy from the local office complex.

Course, there was that time when someone sniffed/watched-over-my-shoulder while I was paying my bills and the next day I had to dispute a bunch of charges... but for just hanging out, a great place.

Had hoped they could force T-Mobile to be more competitive, but this isnt something new and last I looked Starbucks still had ridiculous fees.

Panera!

[dr_dank]

I listened to those guys all the time growing up. Shame about their guitarist.

Now whats this about bread?

Re:Panera!

[NoData]

Dude! Panera rockz! My favorite? "Vulgar Display of Flour."

Good for network testing

[ewg]

I used a Panera Bread hotspot last weekend to test my employer's new VPN client software. Needed an environment different from my home to isolate a problem.

Two cups of "Colombian Supremo Reserva del Patrón" later, well, I hadn't solved the problem, but I was certainly focused on it.

What about linksys

[Wesley Felter]

I thought "linksys" was the largest provider of free WiFi in the world...

I helped make this happen :)

[dmorin]

I'm pleased to say I did my part to make this happen. The Panera in my hometown has wifi. However there's no value in me hanging out there on workdays when there is another Panera exactly halfway along my commute, right on the highway. So I wrote them some feedback on their web site saying that if they had wifi then on bad commute days I could hang out there for hours getting my work done and still see how the traffic is coming.

Not only did they respond, but they actually left me on the list as they kept hitting reply-all and I got to hear all the details about the progress of the mall's wiring that was holding them back (they told me they had to wait for work being done on the mall).

The service was actually activated months before they told me that it would. I've used it several times since then. Very nice! Now if I could only bring myself to take up a table for 3 hours while enjoying a single bagel...

Extremely dumb SonicWall content censorship

[Travis Fisher]

At least at the local Panera, their free wireless connection comes equipped with the SonicWall "firewall" which blocks visits to web sites based on substrings contained in the url. The list of substrings includes things like "sm" and "cum" -- so for instance you can't google for "cosmonaut" or "accumulator" or visit the Southern Methodist University web pages. Unless, of course, you take the care to use the escape codes %xx in place of one or more of these letters...

Just wondering, is this paragon of stupidity in place at other Panera locations?