I was out of town the same week Skype fell off the radar for a couple of days. But that wasn’t my main communication issue.
Somewhere that gets it, Glasgow
Let me say this and get it out of the way: I love this country. In the past few weeks, I’ve been to Belfast and Glasgow, Newcastle and Oxford, York, Leeds, Edinburgh, Cardiff and half a dozen other cities and towns all over this sceptred isle.
New Zealanders who, like me, come to work in the UK — but who only ever see London — have not been to Britain.
That said, I have a couple of messages for the hospitality industry:
1) Stop microwaving pastry. Do you not like food?
2) Room temperature is not a cold drink. Fix your coke fridge.
3) Give me broadband wi-fi or I keep walking, suitcases and all.
It’s not just the record business — it seems that other industries think that the way to make money is to act like you’re the only game in town, charge whatever you can get away with and prevent your customers from doing whatever they want to do.
When I’m travelling — or actually, even when I’m not — I will pop into a cafe in the hopes that I can sit down, collect my thoughts, relax with a cup of coffee and a bite to eat, and catch up with my email and other communications.
Here’s what I won’t do: pay £10 for the privilege.
Surf and Sip, T-Mobile, The Cloud, BT Openzone and Freedom to Surf be damned.
Not only am I not going to fill in a form, give my card details (Oh, you only take credit cards? Well, I don’t have one), and then pay you £5-10 just so I can browse through my email for half an hour while I have what is at best an acceptable cup of coffee (oh yeah: 4) learn to make a decent cup of coffee. Seriously.), I am sure as hell not going to pay a monthly subscription to one of half a dozen corporate wifi services I might stumble across on my travels.
If you run a cafe, it is not difficult to set up a wi-fi hotspot. It should be open and it should be free. You will make far more money than if you try and charge for it. You don’t need to use a corporate wi-fi hotspot provider.
There are competitors in your town who will offer me free wi-fi. I will drink their coffee and eat their cake. I will return there the next day and have a meal. Perhaps something from the bar, if they have one. If they sell other things, I will most likely buy other things.
The point is, they will have my money and you will not.
And then I will tell my friends about this great place I discovered, and they will all go there too.
_______________________________
There’s a moral here for the music industries. Can you spot it?
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[...] around the country from Swindon to Newcastle, Bath to Edinburgh, Manchester to Belfast, Cardiff to Glasgow and a dozen other cities [...]
11 Comments
And so Dubber crashes through the pane glass windows of reality at last…..and you wonder why people are so miserable in this country….and people buy sofas from Ikea and just STAY IN……ha ha.
Hey Andrew,
This got me to thinking (apart from wondering about what the hell free wifi hotspots were – cafes at this end of the Sth Island obviously haven’t heard of them – a lot of ‘em do decent coffee tho)…. Do you remember the ancient (i.e. circa 2002) art of warchalking?
Anyway how about a variant on the practice to markup those cafes that do offer free wifi and and those that don’t. You could use the closed node symbol with a $ or pound or euro or whatever currency symbol you use over there now in it for the latter. Look up “warchalking” on Wikipedia for the original symbols.
Those in the know can just “walk on by” those places that don’t get it. Save you the aggro and disappointment of going through the ‘would you like wifi with that?’ routine. (And possibly yet another average coffee.)
Associated research question: is there a correlation between the availability of free wifi and good coffee in cafes?
This is off topic I guess, but here’s to the Free Wifi Underground.
Is the moral for the music industry:
Give us the freedom to listen and share music and then use smart merchandising to take our money as fans?
This could very well apply to the DIY set too…Once you develop a fanbase by offering free music, use creative merchandising to offer various fandom goods to help generate income. (Live gigs are a given for making money)
There is a very good chance that this was not the moral but I took a stab at it none-the-less!
Excellent article!
J
Um… that we should set up a mobile wifi router at all of our shows? :)
Dubber! You are the truth! Preach!
Well said Andrew. :) Cafes that offer wi-fi but charge for it are of the mindset that they’ll just attract free internet seekers and never sell their coffee. I’m more than happy to lay down a few bucks in food for a quality establishment that offers me the convenience of checking my email while I eat…
As for the music industry, I feel like this goes back to community – give people a reason and a method to engage you up front (cash-free), and your fans will be more than happy to support what you’re doing by buying your product. Stop trying to charge for every little thing you own and make some friends along the way!
Great point….
If anyone wants to set up a free WIFI hotspot, here’s some Open Source software that will do the trick:
http://www.publicip.net/zonecd/what.php
I’m not sure I would recommend completely open wi-fi access points to a coffee shop. That really would encourage leaches who don’t even come in and will instead surf around while sitting in their car. Plus, there are legal issues: Someone pulls up in their car, uses your connection to download some form of highly-illegal content, drives away, and guess who’s liable for it.
It’s easy enough to set up a user/pass system wherein you hand out temporary credentials to anyone who is a paying customer: someone buys a cup of coffee, they get free Internet access while they’re there.
I just thought I’d clarify what I feel are a few issues. Otherwise, your article is pretty well right on.
Prolly the reason why they dont have wifi hotspots in sth island is that it encourages people to buy a flat white and occupy a table all day.
Hard making a living in a non-acoholic cafe i tells ya
To echo Darren’s point, public free wi-fi is about balancing accessibility with security issues. Of course, there are portable information devices that can inform, educate and entertain. They work anywhere, and don’t need wi-fi. I call them books – trite and patronising? Yes, but books are cool and perhaps we all should read them a little more. Try some of George Orwell’s essay writing for a change of pace.
I run a Fon hotspot at my house (down Gillott Road) and I notice from the logs that at least one person connects to it and uses my hotspot daily. Feel happy to do so really, and I am noticing an encouraging upward trend in the adoption of Fon (and Fonesque) free hotspots offered by usually small cafés or hotels.
I was disgusted when I went on a recent holiday (with laptop of course) and unearthed an annoying trend; the more expensive the venue you’re staying in, the more they feel they can charge for the privilege of web access. Of course your businessmen just put it down on expenses and probably claim back a little more than they paid, but it really hacks me off. I wouldn’t have minded if I had international inclusive data usage, but I was sure as hell not going to pay £7.50 for 3G access in France when I pay £7.50 a month for inclusive data in the UK.
Probably a more viable and secure option for cafés and hotels is that the access point is keyed but the key is changed daily or weekly, and to get access you have to ask the counter staff for the key to get access. Of course it could be hacked, but if you go with a WPA-PSK key it’s as secure as your home network, so no big deal.
The funniest thing is I stayed at a small, family-run Hotel in France on the way back home, and I went to the desk and asked how much it’d cost to get a day’s access… To my delight they said, “if you have a room, it’s free” and promptly printed off an access code for their online portal. Five minutes later, I’m on the web. The chain of Campanile B&Bs across France mostly seem to have free wifi too, you log in with your room number and name and that’s that, though it’s a little bit slow. There’s a few Campaniles in the UK too, so might be something to check out. I’ve NEVER had a bad experience staying at a Campanile either, so maybe you should have a look round for one when you’re next on your travels!
I think extortionately-priced wifi is just one of those things the industry’s going to have to realise is unviable – once one big chain rolls out very cheap or free wifi, the rest will follow, but it’s annoying. Almost like stepping back into the dark ages if you have business stuff to attend to while you’re there! I totally get what you’re saying.