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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.
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.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
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
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.
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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Free wireless means you maintain just the router, which is generally a "turn on" situation. Everyone brings their own hardware.
I'd say that's a pretty huge difference.
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.
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.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
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.
Okay- Royalty mis-typing aside...
The entire article just screams, "I have never owned a business!"
See, the businessman sees this as a potential revenue stream. If he wants to run a successful coffee shop, he is thinking about ways to make money.
Going to businesses that make money is great- because they will be around for a while, and are generally nicer to be in.
The coffee shop owner may be thinking: "I only have seating for 12 people. If 5 people sit here for an hour, sucking up my bandwidth...where will the other customers sit?"
Ever go to a coffee shop in a university town? It sucks. Students claim every table, and spread out their laptops, papers, books, backpacks etc. Then they sit there for hours nursing one drink.
Sure, it is great for the students- but what about the business? A lot of other customers are scared away. There are two coffee shops in the town I work (university town) that I have not stepped foot in for about 3 years, exactly for this reason. Even the local Borders Books suffers from this problem.
Making $3.50 per table every 2 hours will not keep them in business. It's all about getting drinks out the door.
No reason to lie.
There's alot of hyperbole around this issue and some substantive facts:
-Very good points on the need to look at the hard business "benefits" Very on target.
-No Cafe owner has ever been sued by the RIAA. The RIAA uses lawsuits for marketing; they want to cut off end users, ie reformed 12 year olds in pepsi ads, not cafe owners. There's not alot of "marketing payoff" in expending legal resources on cafe owner ip lawsuits.
-Costs are the $40 a month for a dsl line from the phone co. Modem/Routers rarely wear out under heavy use.
-From my vantage point here in San Francisco working @ a free wireless cafe, prior points aside,I'd say wifi is a mixed bag for cafe owners.
In the spirit of this thread, my favorite cafe discontinued free wifi a few months back because customers "stayed too long." Often these customers stayed w/o continuously buying drinks and food.
Sooo, if you run a cafe that, w/o free wifi, already has hordes of loyal impassioned customers and quick turnover, your business already does what a successful cafe should do (coffee sales being a great driver of profits--$1.50 on 4 cents of supplies). --Don't take the chance that freeloaders like me (I tip very generously) will crowd up those seats for hours.
The ideal application for free wifi is to turn it on only during otherwise slow hours and post those hours prominently. This way you can use it as necc to hopefully drive business.
-Paid wifi: kind of dumb business model. Great if you need it and mainly work at the same place, but #'s of users are usually pretty few. Won't drive revenues for an otherwise flailing cafe.
Hope this helps!
That's why my favorite coffee shop has some couches and tables designated as study-free zones. If an employee walks by and you have a laptop or textbook out, you'll be kindly asked to move.
I think this works out well for everyone.
I seem to remember there being some software that would cause the POS and router to interact so that it would allow you to connect when you purchased something. Basically, you buy something and your free password to the system is on the receipt. After X amount of time, it will disconnect you, causing you to buy something else. Using this, you could basically keep your product rates the same and watch your average person either clear out when their time is up, freeing up space - or cause them to run over and buy something else real quick. The military (ok, MWR) is currently using the same type of sessions on their computer equipment for soldiers to use, most places you get a half hour to an hour and you're done unless someone ups the time for you.
I know this technically goes against the "free" part of it all, but it is a way for the system to work and free up the tables of people nursing one drink every 3-4 hours. It would also keep others on the outside of the shop from leeching on the connection as well.
Mr. Steele,
Good job...yes..those are the two (or 3 in the case of Cafe Roma. I don't know which location is worse, but I think the one by campus with the couches that sit out in the rain would be the winner).
My original point was that the businessman was doing what he thought he should be doing, based on his own business plan.
'Free Wi-Fi for Everyone' is not a necessary, or even desirable, part of all coffee shop business plans.
I used to own a print shop. Everyone told me I needed to have copiers, because it was so convenient, etc. etc.
They didn't realize that copiers cost a ton of money, and did not attract the clientele I was looking for. Grandma coming around and making her 10 copies each month was going to do nothing for my sales- yet grandma wanted the same level of service as customers ordering $10,000 of printing.
I made money, and grandma went to go drive my competitors nuts. I was very happy.
Some coffee shops thrive on the people who are going to sit there for hours, while others want to provide a nice atmosphere, but get you out the door a lot quicker.
Find out which ones are making real money, and emulate that.
If you are not opening your coffee shop in order to make money...then just invite your friends over to sit on the porch and drink coffee. You'll have a lot fewer hassles, and lose a lot less money.
No reason to lie.