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The Case for Free WiFi?
lgreco writes "Recently I was trying to convince a business man who is about to open an Internet Cafe, to provide WiFi at no charge. I argued about increased business and royalty and proposed that the infrastructure cost these days is reasonable and the recurring cost, along with the amortized payoff of the initial investment, can be recovered by adding a few cents to each beverage, etc. In spite of the numerous discussions on the merits of free WiFi v. paid at coffee shops, restaurants, etc, I was interested in hearing what do you think about the issue and if there are solid examples of successful businesses that offered free WiFi." If you were going to argue for or against this issue, what arguments would you use?
"A lot of proprietors seem to be concerned about the maintenance issue. Not so much about the hardware maintenance than software: auditing etc. Some are also concerned about legal ramifications if their customers are caught downloading music or movies illegally.
I am not aware of any Internet cafe or similar business that got hit by our beloved RIAA but what if their lawyers subpoena a small proprietor for download records? If you are running a shoestring infrastructure with a cable modem with an Airport base station what kind of logs could you possibly proviide? If a kid walks in for a lemonade and starts downloading porn what do you tell the parents when they sent their lawyer to pay you a visit?
It would seem that if you let a provider offer the WiFi service at your place of business for a fee, they can deal with liabilities, maintenance etc, so this is one less thing to worry about when setting up the business. Yet expecting your customers to pay $6-$10/hr for WiFi is so ridiculous and such a turn off for them."
I am not aware of any Internet cafe or similar business that got hit by our beloved RIAA but what if their lawyers subpoena a small proprietor for download records? If you are running a shoestring infrastructure with a cable modem with an Airport base station what kind of logs could you possibly proviide? If a kid walks in for a lemonade and starts downloading porn what do you tell the parents when they sent their lawyer to pay you a visit?
It would seem that if you let a provider offer the WiFi service at your place of business for a fee, they can deal with liabilities, maintenance etc, so this is one less thing to worry about when setting up the business. Yet expecting your customers to pay $6-$10/hr for WiFi is so ridiculous and such a turn off for them."
I was interested in hearing what do you think about the issue and if there are solid examples of successful businesses that offered free WiFi.
Panera has the largest (or one of) free wifi network out there.
... then what is the difference between if the customers have free access to wired terminals, or if there is free WiFi?
I do remember a coffee shop discontinuing free WiFi on the weekends due to people coming in, using the WiFi, hijacking tables, and not buying anything. http://wifinetnews.com/archives/005325.html http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/26/234225 6
I'd suggest "free WiFi with purchase". Buy something and a WiFi access code is printed on your receipt good for an hour or two. The customers get what they want and the freeloaders can go else where.
Granted, it is a slight hassle for the paying customer, and I'm sure dedicated freeloaders will dig through trash to find half-used access codes (or eventually figure out how you're generating codes), but it's still better than smelly nerds hogging tables for head-to-head D&D play over the access point.
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Wouldn't it be possible that people would come and use the free Wi-Fi instead of coming and paying to use the desktop computers?
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The owner initially set-up a "pay as you go" internet connection, where you could either use his computers, or he'd give you a temporary username/ password to access his wireless router. Initially, this worked well for him, as he was the first Coffeeshop in the area to offer internet access. As time went on and other Coffeeshop's started to offer "free" internet (to draw in people), I noticed the volume of people diminished. At that point he made the decision to offer "free" internet for those with wireless laptops, yet continued to charge if you opted to use his computers. I personally feel with all the free WiFi Access Points you're going to have a hard time finding someone who will pay.
One thing to keep in mind if you decide to offer "free" internet is you're going to get people who campout on their laptops and take up table space for hours at a time. Some people even stay there all damn day like it's their personal office space. This might lend itself to loss of business from patrons just wanting a quick cappuccino or dessert and having no seats available. I'd make sure to designate certain tables with time limits or as "No Internet." Good luck!
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You can setup a proxy server which will intercept http: traffic and insert ad banners into the web pages it serves.
I'd get my wife to argue with him. Somehow she won the arguement to delete WoW from my hd.
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Is a coffee shop going to be held accountable if somebody sells drugs using the public phone next to the bathroom? Or discusses an illegal business deal at of their tables? Of course not, so why should they be help responsible for what people do over their Internet connection?
I have a friend who runs a bagel shop (coffee, sandwiches, bagels, etc...). He is moving to a larger location in order to provide free WiFi. The reason hes moving is because he experimented with WiFi before, and his old building was not big enough to accommodate all the extra buisness he recived when providing free WiFi. That to me sounds like a huge reason to provide free WiFi over paid. Ossus
Charging would not alleviate any liability that you mention, and would actually add more. By receiving money, they now have a vested interest in the actions of the customers and are more responsible than if it were free.
While it's practically painless to set up these days, a big argument against WiFi in any business is the type of client you attract.
Remember that you're likely to attract businessy types too busy to do anything but work during lunch, or student/cheap types too cheap to pay for highspeed access themselves (and therefore, unlikely to spend $30 a month on coffee). Is this really the atmosphere you want in your business?
It also depends what type of netcafe you're opening. There are netcafes primarily for gaming, and those primarily for getting a cup of coffee while surfing the net. I've worked in one where people are basically gaming straight up, and the atmosphere is radically different than the local coffee shop.
If you want a social, living coffeeshop, I'd say cut off the internet access. People go to a coffeeshop to relax with friends, listen to jazz, or curl up in a comfy chair with a big book. As much of a netaholic as I am, there has to be a balance somewhere.
What? Marriot doesn't even get away with prices like that. There's a coffee shop down the street that's going to profit from his pricing scheme...
If he's concerned with freeloaders, have the cash register print out a code on the receipt that you can enter into a nocat captive portal to authenticate against a RADIUS server. Give them an hour for each purchase, for instance. Tie the code to single MAC address, etc.
But consider the cost of integrating your cash register, running the server, dealing with the tech support, etc. vs. the cost of sticking a WRT54G on a wire and letting a few freeloaders on the 'net.
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In the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC, there's a coffee shop called "Tryst" (I like them, so I won't post a link here. Poor guys would get slashdotted into oblivion!) that has free wifi. Now, Adams Morgan is NOT a cheap place to have a business, and Tryst is simply huge. The place is full of sofas, loveseats and easy chairs...not a single mass-produced cafe chair can be found in the place, in all truth, so it actually has a relatively low density as far as customers per square foot. They do solid business, though, because they are reknowned as a great place for students, consultants, etc. to work. Go in there at night, and it's social. But go there during the middle of the day, and it's STILL busy, and looking like a forest of laptops. The people take advantage of the free wifi, and they buy coffee, beer, and food at the same time. I used to live mere blocks from them, and actually wrote most of my book in some of those comfortable chairs while racking up a tab consisting of caffeine and beer in alternating amounts. The place has this incredible buzz to it that makes it perfect to work in, and this in turn is the key to their being busy all day long, every day.
There's a flipside to this, though. It's no secret that in some cases, coffee shops that offer free wifi end up with nothing more than wifi freeloaders, who go in, power up and sit down to work without ordering a thing. I honestly don't know how the flip comes about, but Tryst doesn't do anything to require that people purchase, it just takes care of itself. Part of it could be the quality of their food and drink...their coffee is just unbelievable. It's Seattle-good, to put it as a couple of my friends from there did.
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I argued about increased business and royalty and proposed that the infrastructure cost these days is reasonable Lemme get this straight - You put in WiFi and suddenly royalty wants to patronize your coffee shop? Who knew the Queen Mum was into wireless? Is she a java junky and the whole tea thing is just for the tourists? Hell, she's probably lurking on Shashdot as we speak, waiting to drag out some "In Soviet Russia..." cliche.
There's a lot of coffee shops around me ( Washington DC ) which have pay wireless access. I've never felt the need to do so -- even though 90% of the time I spend working on my personal programming projects is done in coffee shops in the morning before work, and internet access would be helpful ( looking up documentation, etc ).
What I've done, instead, is ride my bike around to find coffee shops which either provide free access, or which are near or beneath offices with "default" or "linksys" WAPs without passwords.
In fact, it's gotten to the point that I know off the top of my head about a half-dozen free WAPs in my area which I can use. I see no reason to pay for access when I can just ride my bike down the street to a place where the inept sysadmins don't know any better.
In fact, at one of these coffee shops, ( Caribou Coffee, Pennsyvania Ave & 17th ) there was at one point so many unsecured WAPs that I had to use the "Air Traffic Control" Dashboard widget to select the one I wanted, since there were, literally, four WAPs named "linksys" running on ( I think ) channel 11. The Airport menu bar selector didn't work very well in that situation.
Charging for wireless is basically a fool's errand. Few will use it, and, I have to assume, you'll be lucky to make up the outlay for the service, unless you roll your own billing machanism.
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It's a common policy of many coffeeshops I know of to have minimum purchase requirements. Even before the times of Wifi, cool coffeeshops were where a lot of the young and broke kids would hang out. Invariably they'd try to get away with buying a small cup of coffee then lingering for 3 hours.
The problem with codes or any sort of regulation of the access is that it creates a support problem. So you're slinging coffee and somebody gets a code that doesn't work. Now you have to take time away from making coffee and worry about tech support. It doesn't take too many things like that to screw up the cost/benefit of it. Does your barista know how to fix a WiFi network? Probably not.
Free WiFi became a popular concept because people don't demand much from a free service. If they log on and it doesn't work or it's slow they won't complain because they didn't pay for it. Those who can cope with it will use it and be happy, those who can't don't become a burden to you.
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They have 'cafe accounts'. Basically it's X amount of free access per 24 hours. The first login is a redirect to whatever page you want, and with a little code fragment on there someone can turn on WiFi outside of the walled garden. Their default built-in page only works with IE but the code fragment is browser-agnostic.
... if people want to freeload, they can, just only for X amount of time per day. We're setting it up so that people can also sign up for full-day or full-month unlimited access at a reasonable rate. Put in your CC# on our walled garden server, set your username, get a password, and you've got instant access for however many days you bought.
Anyway, seems like a reasonable solution
That's what I did. The local pub had business Internet access, but was totally neutral whether or not he provided wireless access to his customers. He just didn't want the headache of setting it up or running it. So I purchased a nice cheap 802.11g access point for about $45 from the web about 15 months ago. I just gave it to the pub owner. I set it up, gave it an easy-to-remember WEP code, and that was that. He has never needed to worry about it at all since then. I have had free access there for 15 months now, so that comes out to $3/month for me, and $0 for everyone else. With the occasional beer someone buys me in thanks, I have come out way ahead.
This reminds me of a time before wifi when I would go to a coffee shop at night that hosted some of the best bands in the local music scene. They would charge a low cover, hoping to make it up in bar sales. The majority of the young (pre-high/highschool) kids would go in and only ask for water, which was tap water on ice in glasses) and they would continue to linger.
One evening they switched to bottled water.
Now when a kid ordered water they got a $2.00 bottle of water instead of the free glass. Needles to say, the crowds dissapated a bit and atmosphere in the place improved as well. And the shop made more money than before.
So my opinion is to remember you are running a businness. Do what you need to do to have a quality product, provide a reason for people to be there in the first place, but don't ignore what will keep you in busineess. Freeloaders will not keep you in business.
An easy way to keep people from staying for more than a couple of hours is to not provide power outlets at the tables intended for laptop users. Short of somebody coming in with a fully charged spare battery or two, most laptops will chew through the battery in a couple of hours. Some will last longer but most won't.
You'll find this is true at the larger free wifi providers like Panera. You can use their wifi for only as long as your battery holds out at which point you can still sit and stare at a blank screen if you so desire.
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If you have infinite tables, Free Services are great, and often better than metered services, because metering is a pain.
But you don't have infinite tables, and somebody sitting on your wifi for an hour with a cup of coffee might be LOOSING you money.
If I could wave a wand and create whatever system I wanted I would have BOTH. This way you get to have the best of both worlds.
A free system that had capped bandwidth (50k, perhaps) and was turned off during periods of peak patronage of the cafe. You start out with a sign that says "may be turned off during peak hours" - and then you turn it off whenever you're getting too full.
A paid system that doesn't have bandwidth caps or has much higher ones and never goes off. This should cost less than using one of your workstations, but not necessarily that much less.
Setting both up is pretty easy; just install two access points.
Also, if you're going to put in a nice system be sure to offer it to all your nearby business and residential neighbors to make a few extra bucks.
I am not a lawyer, but I don't think you have an obligation to keep those records. You have an obligation to turn them over if you have them, and an obligation not to selectively destroy them AFTER you know something bad happened. But I don't believe you are required to track all the details.
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Zyxel sells an access point designed for just this purpose: ZyAir B-4000. Much easier than implementing it yourself, unless there is already on Open Source solution based on NoCat or something similar.
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If a coffee shop has a problem with people who stay too long they need to look at what they do at peep shows. They should have a Faraday cage around each seat with a little flap that stays open while you feed coins into the meter. As soon as your time runs out you get shut off.
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They found that people would order a coffee and then work all day long, decreasing their per customer revenue dramatically.
Other cafes are cutting access only at high-traffic times. When you can fill your seats without it - say, Saturdays, why not? But when you can fill otherwise empty seats with it, why not? People partly come to see other people - the hard core coffee drinkers have espresso machines at home after all. So if wifi gets people there to be watched, even if there's no direct profit from them there's profit from maintaining a space where the people watchers - and those who just like the background of humanity for their own reveries - can be fulfilled. And they are your profit center.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Even better, since the business name is on the hotspot AP, you'll draw in people from the surrounding businesses over time.
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My wife and I own a little outdoor cafe in Tempe, AZ, and we offer free Wi-Fi. I work as a software developer during the day, and my wife runs our restaurant. We would have paid the approx. $35 per month to Qwest for a 1 Mbps DSL line anyway (to use our computer), and the DSL modem had the wireless router built right in. So why not offer it for free? I checked around to see what if any companies wanted to put in service and maintain it. The hassle factor was way too high, and I know my customers would have been irritated at the prospect of paying. For about $1 a day (I sound like Sally Struthers), I can get people in the door to buy my coffee, sandwiches and/or beer. When they're done surfing the web, they'll stick around for the live music. We don't get too many squatters. When we do, the server (the human who brings you your food, not the one that delivers HTTP content) just reminds the offender that the internet is free for our CUSTOMERS. I thought about a technological solution, but I think that the human touch works a little better. Generally people will buy something if reminded, rather than leave if they just get cut off. I get plenty of positive feedback from my customers about the free internet. On the other hand, I have never had anyone suggest that we start charging. There will be people who abuse anything you give away. We have had customers take handfuls of sugar packets and stuff them in their purses. We have kids take a dozen packets of crackers to feed the ducks (we're on a lake). I can't tell you how many times people have stolen our soap pumps out of the bathrooms. These are all things you have to put up with when you own a business that serves the public. But when you start nickel-and-diming people to death (gee, $1.50 for the coffee, plus 2 Sweet-and-Lows at 10 cents each... your total is $1.84 with tax), people get irritated and don't come back. And that's how people feel when you charge them six bucks an hour to surf the web.
Seriously, I'd like an Internet Bar where I can bring my laptop and then drink alcoholic beverages. C'mon guys... Hurry up with the idea! I'm tired of having to bring my vodka flask to coffee shop.
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Making $3.50 per table every 2 hours will not keep them in business. It's all about getting drinks out the door.
obviously, you dont' understand the reason why people go to 'coffee shops'
If all you want is a quick cup of really good overpriced joe, just go to Starbucks or make your own at home for pennies. Locally owned coffee shops usually go for the tradition coffee shop crowd: freegans, beatnicks, hippies, students, artists, punks, emo kids...in general the 'hip' people. The kind of people who would be ashamed if their friends saw them going into evil starbucks.
Having free WiFi attracts these types b/c by definiton, living outside the mainstream usually means being poor in relation to the hyper consumer mainstream.
Now, by going for the 'hip' kids, it attracts all those who are curious, intrigued, bemused, etc. in the company of said 'hip' kids.
If you're looking for big black lines of profit from a traditional coffee shop, just move on, b/c that's not what it's about...it's about establishing a place that artists and whatnot can be artists, nurse one coffee for hours, and get free internet, adn THEN profiting off of all the WANNABE 'hip' people. It won't ever go public, but it will last, and be loved by it's patrons
So, to have a good, true 'coffee shop' you have to be willing to sacrifice some profit, but not a fatal sacrifice. And in return you get hours of amusement from your patrons, and they love you for it.
Maybe there's a way to just charge the wannabe's like you for wifi, while letting us punk beatnicks get our wifi for free.
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World Cup has at least three locations:
They all offer free WiFi via Personal Telco and seem to be doing very well. It might be because they also have great coffee, a nice atmosphere, and friendly staff. It might be because almost every coffee shop in town other than Star*ucks offer free WiFi. I especially enjoy:
Mod parent up.
Being a college student, I know of all the local places that provide free WiFi, and I also know of the places that have net access outside of the actual building, and allow you to use it. These are the places that are consistently busy with people during nice weather, and it is a "free" advertisement for their business.
I'm far more likely to visit a business that is less restrictive (ie free unlimited WiFi) because I never know what kind of work (or play) I will be involved in when I get to a cafe.
I think it would be nice to have a "work free" place to go to.
I can just see it now...
Now at Local Coffee Place!
No Internet!
Crappy Cell Phone reception!
No Loud Music!
Nice soft seats!
No Work!
God that would be great (just like my basement though.)
Those people will be dead by the end of the day.