Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/85691
phone service provider. Th at greatly increases the number of potential users in a café, and demand on the café's bandwidth. "A priority for us, as far as the Wi-Fi is concerned, is we like to provide pretty fast speeds for the guests, and obviously the more guests that are using it, it has a tendency to slow everything down a bit," Laramie says. "If you start with a bigger bandwidth, you've maintained high speeds for yourself in terms of credit card processing and those things." In practical terms, that means a cable connection whenever it's available and DSL when it's not. In some especially remote locations, Beans and Brews shops have used wireless line-of- sight dishes aimed at the nearest cell tower. Right now, cable is usually the most practical option for those who want faster speeds than DSL. A third, even faster option is coming on strong: fi ber-optic service (FiOS). In November, Verizon is making its Quantum FiOS available to small businesses. SWEET SPOT OF SPEED It all comes down to data-transfer speeds and bandwidth. Someone setting up a Wi-Fi system (or looking to make a substantial upgrade) needs to fi nd the sweet spot of adequate speed at an aff ordable price. The more customers in a shop using Wi-Fi at once, the greater the demands on the system. Photo courtesy Beans and Brews be featured in a café, it's generally a good idea to get as much download capacity as you can aff ord, says Ric Caselli, general manager and chief RF engineer for MPBX LLC, a Wi-Fi consulting and engineering fi rm. "I would defi nitely like to have double digits because it will Th e defi nition of "adequate" is edging upward, because demand for bandwidth is increasing, thanks to more users with access to bigger chunks of data. Streaming music, video or movies can place huge demands on a Wi-Fi system. One megabit per second (mbps) download speed used to be the norm for a small establishment, but that's generally considered inadequate now. "What you don't want to do is say, 'Hey, we've got free Wi-Fi here,' and you get a crowd of people on a Sunday morning trying to access it using their laptops, or even their phones, and they're on a one-megabit connection and everyone' Wasserman, director of small business solutions for Verizon. Wasserman says that a café that has 10 or so Wi-Fi users s unhappy," says David simultaneously at peak times probably needs at least 5 mbps download speed. (For almost all options, upload speed is usually much slower, usually starting at about 1 mbps and edging upward. Th is refl ects the reality that most café patrons are not going to be transmitting huge fi les from their devices.) As the number of users and/or the size of the fi les they want to download increases, the optimal download speed increases, to double fi gures and up to 25 mbps and more. SPEEDING IT UP As connection technology becomes more sophisticated, its data speed increases. Th e commercial DSL service off ered by Verizon ranges from 1 to 15 mbps. FiOS, the newest option, starts at 15 mbps and ranges up to 150. Verizon is about to introduce Quantum FiOS for small business, with download speeds ranging up to 300 mbps. Depending on how prominently Wi-Fi service is going to be a diff erentiator, depending on your target," Caselli says. "People are going to be able to surf the Internet at single-digit levels, but if you can aff ord to spend a couple hundred bucks a month and have a good commercial connection [at] 50 megabits per second, it's going to be very noticeable. " INTANGIBLE BENEFIT Being able to aff ord it is, of course, one of the biggest obstacles. Charging directly for Wi-Fi service usually isn't an option: For one thing, customers who have to pay will probably head for a cybercafé, where they can get better services for their money. Practically speaking, this means the only direct fi nancial benefi t a café will get from Wi-Fi is the intangible one of customers who might not have come in otherwise. Th at may be intangible, but it's still real. "It's been a pretty good draw," says Mitchell Harvey of Mitchell's Coff ee House. "For the expense of actually having it, I think we more than make up for it in sales to people using it." Th is can be enhanced by requiring a purchase for access. In addition, asking Wi-Fi users for their e-mail addresses or other contact information before letting them on the network can be a good source for follow-up information about specials or other enticements. In some cases, coff eehouses can make Internet service more aff ordable the same way many households do: by bundling it with voice phone service. Many providers off er discount packages to customers who buy both. Mitchell's Coff ee House gets both voice phone service and a cable Internet connection for its Wi-Fi from Bright House. Th is bundle, at $170 a month, was even better than the bundle it had been buying from Verizon, which was about $60 a month more expensive for DSL, not cable, service. (For shops that feature television, 11