“We’ve argued before that various eating establishments are better off offering free Wi-Fi to their customers than trying to squeeze the extra cash out of their pockets. Here’s yet another example of a place that has realized this. Some pubs in the UK are now offering free Wi-Fi to customers, saying that those customers are paying for it by coming in and ordering food that they wouldn’t have ordered otherwise. That’s the same argument that Schlotzky’s Deli has made in the US, and it makes a lot of sense. These places aren’t in the business of providing internet access. They’re in the business of serving food – and the internet access should be seen as a promotional concept to convince more people to come into their establishments to buy more food. Unfortunately, companies like Boingo are going around trying to convince companies that they need to make extra money off of these things, and are making adoption much slower. Why restaurants think they should pretend they’re in the ISP business is beyond me.” – Techdirt.
The TeleRead take: True, true, true. Imagine the problems for the big boys if, via Wi-Fi, the best business model for the Net turns out to be “free” in many cases–even without ads? Apps like e-books just don’t require that much bandwidth by broadband standards. Meanwhile I see Wi-Fi continues to give grief to cell carriers.
