Where has all the free Wi-Fi gone?

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

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.”