News
Email
Print
PICKING UP THE SIGNAL - Free Wi-Fi is big draw for local businesses
PICKING UP THE SIGNAL
Journal photo by Amanda Muschlitz
Ellen Davis (left) and her daughter Claire, 17, take advantage of the free Wi-Fi at Panera Bread on Cloverdale Avenue in Winston-Salem.
ADVERTISEMENT
RELATED MULTIMEDIA
» INTERACTIVE GRAPHIC: What Is Wi-Fi?
Click to compare free Wi-Fi connections in the city
Published: August 30, 2009
On a couch at Panera Bread, Ellen Davis and her daughter Claire, 17, stared at a laptop, looking up information on a college class that Claire wants to audit.
Free Wi-Fi -- a wireless Internet connection for people using laptops, netbooks and other portable Web-browsing devices -- is a big draw for the Davises.
"We do not have Internet at home," Ellen Davis said. "We decided to let our children grow up with books instead of TV or the Internet."
Claire is a high-school senior at Salem Baptist. She is used to not having the Internet at home. But when they need access they visit businesses with Wi-Fi "hot spots," such as the Panera Bread on Cloverdale Avenue.
"I think it's great," Ellen Davis said of the free Wi-Fi. "It draws people to the business."
We're living in a wireless world, and Winston-Salem was an early city to recognize it.
"The number of gadgets that are able to connect to Wi-Fi hot spots has grown incredibly," said Ananda Mitra, a communications professor at Wake Forest University who studies new technologies and the way they change peoples' lives. "It's not just people with computers; many of the smartphones now have this capability.… Clearly, it is an advantage for people on the move."
Having access to Wi-Fi, he said, "is more and more of a convenience issue. There's a term we use in our research, ‘ubiquity of technology.' Electricity is a classic example. You only notice it when you don't have access to it. And Wi-Fi is starting to be like electricity in that sense."
As more people use Wi-Fi, free access has become increasingly common. "There's a certain business advantage in providing it for free," Mitra said. For example, suppose there are two otherwise-identical coffee shops sitting side by side, one with free Wi-Fi and the other with either no Wi-Fi or charging money for people to connect. "The one that is offering it for free will have a higher clientele," Mitra said.
In the past few years, free Wi-Fi can be found not only in coffee shops but at restaurants, bookstores and other businesses -- including some airports, such as Charlotte Douglas International Airport, where Mitra was waiting for a plane while being interviewed and sending further information through his laptop.
For the past six years in Winston-Salem, people have been able to access Wi-Fi using the city's "Wi-Fi on Fourth" -- available from Poplar to Main streets. And many businesses in that stretch and elsewhere offer their own free Wi-Fi.
B.J. Frentzel, the director of operations at Brew Nerds on Fourth Street, said that Wi-Fi is "almost like an expectation" for coffee shops.
"We're going for the plugged-in crowd," he said. "We want to be a place where people can hang out."
"It is a selling tool," said Gena Knighten, the manager of Chelsee's Coffee Shop on Trade Street. "It's a way to get people in. Nowadays, people all but expect it -- especially the younger crowd."
Brett Hunter, a videographer who lives in downtown Winston-Salem, is one of the regulars at such shops as Brew Nerds and Krankies Coffee. He's gotten good at finding the hottest Wi-Fi spots.
"I don't like working at home, so a coffee shop can be like an office," he said as he sat behind his laptop at Brew Nerds. Providing convenient Wi-Fi, he said, "is one of the smartest ways a place can attract a crowd and hold a crowd."
He drifts between various coffee shops, such as Brew Nerds, Krankies and Sands Coffee, and restaurants as he connects to the Web. He buys coffee and snacks along the way. "It's nice to be a patron of all of them," he said.
Know the business's rules
When you are searching for a Wi-Fi location, it's important to know what the rules are.
Brew Nerds, for instance, provides free Wi-Fi but limits customers to two hours of Wi-Fi every 24 hours. Hunter said he understands that approach.
"They don't want squatters," he said. "I know I'm going to be buying stuff. I'm not a complete freeloader."
Another part of the Wi-Fi hunt, Hunter said, is to look for a place with reliable service. In his experience, he said, "The city of Winston-Salem's service (on Fourth Street) is unreliable. It shuts off every 10 to 20 minutes, then comes back up after 60 seconds."
He said that he generally finds that to be just a nuisance, but for people who are trying to upload or download data it can cause bigger problems, requiring them to start over. Several other people said they had similar problems using the Wi-Fi on Fourth service.
Dennis Newman, the chief information officer for the city of Winston-Salem, defended the service.
"It's used every day by numbers of people," he said. "There are times we've had hardware failures and outages, but overall I think it's been a pretty reliable service."
The city does not keep data on usage, but on Tuesday and Wednesday of last week it recorded seven to 14 people using the service at any one time, including 10 connections at 8 a.m. on Wednesday.
Newman said that there have been some interruptions lately because of the heat.
"On very hot days, the housing that the access points are in will get hot," he said. "That will cause the equipment to restart."
The city started Wi-Fi on Fourth in 2003 as a part of an economic-development initiative on Fourth Street. WinstonNet, a nonprofit group, tried two years ago to set up free community-wide Wi-Fi, but had to put the plan on hold last year when the company it was working with backed out.
Not always entirely free
Some businesses provide free Wi-Fi with unlimited use, some are free for a limited time and others require customers to pay for Wi-Fi.
"It's free Wi-Fi," Knighten said. "But the facilities are not provided free of charge. They're paid for by purchases.
"If they haven't bought anything in 15 minutes, then they're asked if we can help them," she said.
Providing the access doesn't cost much, she said, because the shop already pays for Internet and just has to add a router to let the public tap in. The only overhead is the occasional need to upgrade the router.
But there are other business costs.
"We have electricity, chairs and tables," she said. "We pay for employees to be here, so there is overhead."
Chelsee's opened in 2002 and added free Wi-Fi about a year later.
The service is particularly popular during the school year, "especially around exam time."
"We do try to keep a quiet atmosphere for business people and students," she said. "There have been times when every seat and every outlet was taken up."
X1 Communications is one of several high-speed Internet companies that work with local businesses to provide wireless connections for customers. At Hanes Mall, Thruway Shopping Center, Downtown Thai, Rana Loca and Finnigan's Wake, customers can access X1's service and get an hour of free access a day or pay a subscription fee that runs from $3.95 a day to $24.95 a month for unlimited use.
From 50 to 100 people buy the daily subscriptions during a month, said Tom Laydon, the CEO of X1, and 10 to 20 a month are buying unlimited use, which was started in the past two months.
Laydon said that the service has been popular in the six months that X1 has been offering it. The company's Web site, www.x1communications.com, lists 17 hot spots around Winston-Salem, and Laydon said that there are more in the works. Businesses buy their Internet access from X1 for $70 to $125 a month, depending on the connection speed. X1 provides them with a separate wireless router that they can share with the public at no extra charge.
"My business plan will work if I get local support from businesses," Laydon said.
The connection speeds X1 offers have an average download speed of 1.5 to 2.5 megabytes per second for free access, which he described as typical speeds. The download speeds are higher for subscribers, he said.
Downtown is particularly bustling with Wi-Fi opportunities, but there are hot spots available all over town, from Barnes & Noble off Hanes Mall Boulevard to the Mr. Waffle on Peters Creek Parkway.
At Panera Bread on Cloverdale Avenue, several dozen customers a day use the free Wi-Fi. Panera doesn't set any time limits.
"We want them to come in and stay all day if they want," said Ellen Garrett, a marketing coordinator who oversees 14 Panera Bread restaurants in the Triad and Western North Carolina.
Though people can come in and use the service for free, sometimes general manager Clay Hampton sees people sitting in the parking lot tapping into the store's Wi-Fi.
"I really don't have a problem with that," he said.
One of the regulars at Panera Bread is Ellen Coble, who comes between work appointments. She is a fundraiser for Hospice & Palliative CareCenter. "I was here this morning for a meeting, and now I'm back," she said on a recent afternoon when 10 of 18 occupied booths had customers using laptops.
"I'll come in while I'm preparing presentations and have a Coke," she said. "Then the smells of the bread make you buy some food."
Benjamin Chance, who was visiting from Charleston S.C., said he likes to use free Wi-Fi to get online to check the latest news. But there are limits to what he will do while using public Wi-Fi. "No banking or anything like that," he said. "I'll do that at home."
Using security procedures
Security can be an issue with Wi-Fi. Some users can tap into surrounding laptops to essentially read over their neighbor's shoulder and steal data or important information.
"Casual users should probably know how to keep their system in preventative mode," Hunter said. "It's a calculated risk if you go to an area where you're surrounded by computer nerds who know how to (see what's on your screen)."
Many computers let people choose different network settings when they log on to a wireless connection. The preventative mode for a public location is designed to keep the computer from being visible to other computers around it and to help protect the computer from malicious software from the Internet.
Justin Robertson, a technician at The Computer Place on Jonestown Road, said that it is a good idea to avoid accessing personal information or giving out credit-card information online while using free public Wi-Fi.
"There are programs that are out that can pretty much capture everything that goes through Wi-Fi," he said.
There are ways to make using public Wi-Fi safer, he said.
"The first thing would be to make sure you have anti-virus protection. Most anti-viruses will come with a firewall that helps prevent people from getting into your computer."
The Wi-Fi Alliance, an international nonprofit group that sets safety and other standards for Wi-Fi, provides some additional tips at www.wi-fi.org/secure_your_wi-fi.
"Wi-Fi is a shared medium, so if the hot spot is completely open, that information could be observed by someone who is sniffing the airwaves to see what's being transmitted," said Edgar Figueroa, the executive director of the Wi-Fi Alliance. The security procedures the alliance recommends, he said, "are all good ways of ensuring you're preventing others from seeing what is being transmitted.
"I often refer to it as a seat belt. It's very safe, very proven, very reliable. But if you don't engage it, it's useless."
■ Tim Clodfelter can be reached at 727-7371 or at tclodfelter@wsjournal.com
Email
Print
