The Irish Times 24 Nov. 2010 - Where has all the free Wi-Fi gone?

Amalgam

I tend to agree about the social aspect of being in a Café, not having a place solely full of customers hunched over screens and fidgeting away with keyboards.

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The Irish Times - Wednesday, 24 November, 2010
Where has all the free Wi-Fi gone?

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2010/1124/1224284016547.html

Many cafe and restaurant owners are beginning to rethink the advantages of offering free internet access to their customers, writes BRIAN O'CONNELL.

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Wi-Fi free, rather than free Wi-Fi: Niall Kavanagh at Metro Café, South William Street, Dublin.Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill

LAST WEEK on Grafton Street, I had it in mind to do some e-mailing over a cup of coffee. Wandering into Bewley’s, I took out my laptop and, before ordering, checked with the waiter that the cafe offered free Wi-Fi. He shook his head. “No, sorry,” he said. “Because we’re really busy it would make people stay too long.”

Officially, the line from Bewley’s, via their PR company, is: “Many of our customers access the internet using their own mobile broadband connections [using] laptops and broadband dongles. We also tend to see a lot of people using smart phones. We currently don’t have free Wi-Fi access in the cafe.”

And it seems that Bewley’s is not alone, with many cafe and restaurant owners now beginning to rethink the advantages of offering free internet access to their customers. Niall Kavanagh is co-owner of Metro Cafe on South William Street, and has steadfastly resisted offering Wi-Fi facilities to customers.

“I never really subscribed to the theory of having it in the cafe at all,” he says. “The idea of a cafe is that you come in and sit down and chat to people. If people are staring at screens, then it kills the whole idea.”

Kavanagh has been running his cafe for 15 years and realises the world has changed enormously in that time. He’s not anti-modernity; he’s just anti anti-social. “I’m an old timer, and I know the way it is going, but imagine being able to connect with someone else, with a real person.

“A man used to come into us from St Luke’s every day. I’d say to him, ‘How are things today?’ and he’d say, ‘As long I can make it down here, I’ll be alright’. That’s the kind of thing I’m after – it’s called community. Some bigger chains might offer free Wi-Fi, but they can’t offer that.”

Perhaps one way forward in a world without free Wi-Fi may be for more cafes and restaurants to charge customers for internet access after a certain length of time.

Darragh Doyle, communications manager at boards.ie, says free Wi-Fi is a pull factor when he goes looking for a cafe, although he is not always successful in finding it.

“Any cafe that provides free Wi-Fi is something that I’ll look for. I know a number of people will. I was in the Four Seasons in Ballsbridge yesterday and their only option for non-residents was a shocking €22 for a 24-hour pass. Ridiculous stuff.”

Doyle believes that Wi-Fi should be free for a period of time, say 15 minutes, after which customers would have to pay for any additional access, once the service provided is reliable and secure. He says he understands that cafes have a living to make and free Wi-Fi is not always commercially viable.

In Cork city, one of the city’s most popular cafes is Cork Coffee Roasters, on Bridge Street, run by John Gowan, who has also resisted offering free internet access to customers. “If someone desperately wants to check their e-mail, we let them use our access, but other than that we don’t provide internet,” he says. “One person on a laptop can take up room for four people.”

Gowan admits he has probably lost customers because of the absence of free Wi-Fi, but he believes the atmosphere in the cafe is all the better for it. “Sure, we lose customers sometimes. But to be honest, people come here more for our coffee.

“There was an internet cafe across the road and fellas would still come in to us to ask if we had internet. They didn’t want to spend the euro an hour on access. It can often be an image thing where people just want to show off their laptops. It doesn’t work in a small place like ours.”

Regular cafe user Eoin Fahey (24) says that cafes will just have to get used to new technologies and that any move to restrict internet access is doomed to failure – customers will simply go elsewhere.

“I do think cafes should move with the times. If I needed to get online and I couldn’t get Wi-Fi in a certain place, I’d go to a different cafe,” he says. “However, I wouldn’t abuse the free Wi-Fi service by spending hours online over one cup of coffee.”

Firmly rejecting accusations of customers overstaying their welcome, Fahey says: “People have always frequented cafes for hours on end. Before Wi-Fi, there were books or newspapers. I would have thought that was the whole idea of cafe culture.”

Capt'n Midnight

Cafés don't charge customers for toilets which cost a lot more to provide than WiFi

A nice compromise would be to restrict BB access to something that wasn't very usable, dial up speed throttling , so people could get emails trickling in , but wouldn't be able to surf

Capt'n Midnight

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Cafés don't charge customers for toilets which cost a lot more to provide than WiFi

A nice compromise would be to restrict BB access to something that wasn't very usable, dial up speed throttling , so people could get emails trickling in , but wouldn't be able to surf

actually that would be more likely to make me think negatively about that cafe...just think of the frustration

mikemac

There's have been days I went to McDonalds O'Connell St Dublin, I sit upstairs

And I'd struggle to find a table,many with people there with laptops.

All the same, they need those seats free for paying customers, you can't have seats taken for hours.

Now I think McDonalds has a time restriction and give tokens so maybe they have found a solution

Capt'n Midnight

Deleted User wrote: »

actually that would be more likely to make me think negatively about that cafe...just think of the frustration

having to pay through the nose for it would really upset me, you can get a 1GB per month for a tenner on 3G so paying something similar an hour or two is pure gouging

the idea is that you give enough WiFi for essential contact but not enough to be an internet café

bhickey

I set a cafe hoptspot up a while back where 30 mins was free and anything more required a free code supplied by staff with the next purchase. The 30 mins restriction was put in place 'cause literally every table in the cafe would sometimes be taken by students who'd buy one item and then sit for 2-3 hours surfing.

PogMoThoin

bhickey wrote: »

I set a cafe hoptspot up a while back where 30 mins was free and anything more required a free code supplied by staff with the next purchase. The 30 mins restriction was put in place 'cause literally every table in the cafe would sometimes be taken by students who'd buy one item and then sit for 2-3 hours surfing.

I've seen this done before, free for the first 20-30mins and then chargable by the hour with one hour scratch and sniff vouchers available to buy at the counter. This is a better idea and very easily setup with a Linksys router running Dd-wrt, there are companies who will sell them pre-configured with the scratch and sniff vouchers.

http://www.hotspotsystem.com/en/hotspot/install_guide.html

senordingdong

bhickey wrote: »

I set a cafe hoptspot up a while back where 30 mins was free and anything more required a free code supplied by staff with the next purchase. The 30 mins restriction was put in place 'cause literally every table in the cafe would sometimes be taken by students who'd buy one item and then sit for 2-3 hours surfing.

That's a much better idea.

But Bewleys and good ideas don't go well together.

Then again...maybe some of the cafes and restaurants are simply cutting expenditures.

DemoniK

How much of it is not wanting to be sued?

If Wifi/Internet access is given freely - there is no way to track down the IP address that has done something that the cafe could be penalised for, e.g. upload illegal music via an eircom connection the cafe is using...

Even charging for it doesn't fix that type of an issue. The last thing a cafe would want is to be taken to a court by IRMA for uploading music done by customer.. First off their public liability is much greater than an individual so they stand the chance of being sued for much more than you or I, and secondly should it happen they stand to get a lot of bad publicity if dragged through courts... Either way it's not a good situation.

I don't own or run a cafe, but I can understand the issues that might be there...