Free the WiFi
Despite the noise and the hustle and bustle I am often more productive when sitting (as I am now) looking out over a road, sharing my space with strangers who are unlikely to walk up to my desk and ask me a question.
The one part of working far from home or office is that I am responsible for my own connectivity when I am not in the usual workspace. There are a few options in this situation. One: use my phone or a dongle to connect to the cellular network and allow our beloved mobile operators to charge whatever they feel like for connectivity or use the WiFi provided by the coffee shop to connect, usually at an equally exorbitant price.
Now if you have travelled to the US you will know that you can barely throw a stone on a major city without hitting a free WiFi hotspot. In SA most public WiFi is hidden behind security and you have to pay by the MB or by the minute to use their precious bandwidth.
In the past this was understandable, the restaurant owners were paying for their bandwidth by the GB and if I sat there all day and mooched their bandwidth I could have ended up costing them money rather than earning them money and that does not make good business sense.
Enter the era of uncapped ADSL. Now the coffee shop owners are paying a fixed monthly fee (MWeb charges R2359 for uncapped business ADSL) for an uncapped ADSL service, so why are they still charging for WiFi. The simple answer is because they can. Us lemmings are conditioned to paying for WiFi and because of this the businesses will keep charging for it. Only now the coffee shops have a fixed monthly cost and a variable income stream.
The simple truth is that those people that choose to work from coffee shops typically drink coffee. They generally don’t just drink one cup of coffee either, they buy food as well, all of which make money for the coffee shop. I would think that the lure of free bandwidth would be more than enough to get more feet through the door to pay whatever a tall latte costs nowadays.
Just judging the number of laptops in this coffee shop (six that I can see) being work friendly is good for business.
The only loser from this scenario will be the companies selling WiFi solutions to the coffee shops. There are those that sell management and ISP services and they will do fine once they switch over to an uncapped offering, but for the companies that own and manage the solution and do the billing and set the prices, the end may be nigh.
Free the WiFi << Comments and views
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