The Caffe Nero chain has decided to give free w-fi access in its British high street cafes.

In recent years a large number of cafes have decided to restrict or even completely abandon the concept of wi-fi, on the basis that it brings potentially more problems than benefits – at one time it was widely touted as a major promotional benefit which would bring customers into cafes and keep them there, but it also brings with it the problem of ‘camping’, where laptop users dominate tables for hours at a time, for the price of only one coffee.

Caffè Nero has chosen The Cloud as its wi-fi service provider, and intends to offer free wireless internet access in its 450 coffee shops from September. Caffe Nero had previously offered a paid-for signal through BT Openzone, and has said that it changed service provider because it required a wi-fi signal of the same high standard as its coffee.

A spokesman for The Cloud has told us that there will be no time restriction, and that Nero customers will switch on their laptops and be greeted by a specific Caffe Nero welcome page.

By contrast, Kyle Glanville of the Intelligentsia coffee-shop company from America, speaking at a coffee meeting in Denmark this month, described his company’s slightly-aggressive attitude towards wi-fi squatters and ‘campers’:

“I think wi-fi can hurt your business profoundly. We get called ‘Hitler’ if we don’t provide it, and I think there is now a whole movement to restrict it in coffee shops. If you involve your staff in having to give codes, you’re turning them into IT people, not what they’re really there for.

“So what we do is this – we offer no free power outlets. We heavily restrict the signal, by putting the wi-fi router so far away from the tables that the signal is weak, just enough to read e-mails… and then we make no promises about it, but just say we have something ‘slightly passable’, but that we’re in the coffee business, not the wi-fi business.

“We think that’s the right way to go!”

[!] Report this post

Processing your request, Please wait....

Report as:	Invalid Contents Other
Write in Words: (Optional)