When direct marketing company More2 moved into its newly refurbished central London offices three years ago, director Claire Nicholson decided to install a wireless network (Wi-Fi), as well a wired one.
The decision has paid off. The company has grown rapidly and every time someone joins, the firm has to find them an internet connection. "The rooms only have so many network points so if we didn‘t have wireless, it would really restrict how many people you could get into a room," she says. "Having Wi-Fi gives us the flexibility to decide where we want to move next, as opposed to just basing it around where the network points are."
That‘s not the only benefit. More2 staff are equipped with laptops so when they give a presentation to a client, they can take the laptop into a meeting room and deliver a presentation that includes pertinent websites without the need for trailing cables. And clients, too, can use More2‘s secure wireless connection if they want to work between meetings or check their email.
Wi-Fi (the popular name for the 802.11 radio transmission standard) provides a wireless connection to an access point. That access point, also known as a hotspot, is in turn is connected to the internet. Because the vast majority of laptops - as well as many PDAs - are now Wi-Fi-enabled, you can take your laptop out on the road and connect to the internet from anywhere that has a hotspot. All without the need for cables.
"Business is absolutely embracing Wi-Fi," says Owen Geddes, director of business development at Wi-Fi provider The Cloud. And it‘s not just larger companies. Geddes has seen a big uptake of Wi-Fi among small businesses, because of the flexibility it offers, not just within the office but to mobile employees: sales staff, for example, who need internet access while at the airport or on the train.
Another small firm that is benefiting from a Wi-Fi system is 82Ask, a company that sends answers to any question by text. It has been using T-Mobile‘s Wi-Fi service since it was founded four years ago and sees it as a major reason for its success. "We had to be very mobile so we could meet with potential investors," says the firm‘s chief executive Sarah McVittie. "We‘re based in Cambridge and a lot of meetings with partners, clients and investors are down in London. It was very important to us that we could always connect to the office. It was a key aspect of how we were able to get as far as we did."
Heating up
Finding a hotspot is getting easier. There are now approximately 9,000 commercial hotspots in the UK, about 7,500 of which are owned by The Cloud, which then makes them available to other service providers such as O2 and BT OpenZone to sell to customers. Most of the remaining hotspots are owned by T-Mobile and BT OpenZone.
Hotspots tend to be located in airports, hotels and coffee shops, such as Starbucks, as well as on GNER and some Virgin trains. The number of public hotspots is growing fast: The Cloud plans to extend its coverage to 6,000 more bars, pubs and cafés, and has struck an agreement with McDonald‘s to put Wi-Fi in 1,200 of its branches. Although Wi-Fi coverage is usually indoors, the City of London now has an outdoor Wi-Fi network and we can soon expect to see outdoor coverage in Manchester. Other cities will no doubt soon follow suit.
So if you‘re thinking of using Wi-Fi, how do you go about it? The answer depends on whether you want staff to use Wi-Fi when they‘re out on the road or when they‘re in the office, or both. To use Wi-Fi on the road, staff will need to be equipped with a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop or another mobile device. When they find a hotspot, they may be asked to pay for it there and then by entering their credit card details or they may be required to buy a voucher.
Typically, Wi-Fi access time is sold in units of 60 minutes, costing £5. This can be wasteful if you only use, say, 40 minutes. But there are plenty of other options. The Cloud offers a 'paygo‘ voucher, which means you pay in advance for 30, 60 or 180 minutes: if you use only a few of your minutes at one location, then you can use up the rest at another Cloud location.
You could also sign up with a single provider, such as BT OpenZone, which offers several different payment options: one-hour, one-day or 30-day vouchers; a top-up account paying by the minute; or a monthly subscription. If your Wi-Fi usage is high, it is worth considering a monthly subscription: BT OpenZone charges £10 for 250 minutes a month or £25 for 4,000 minutes a month, including the use of OpenZone hotspots abroad. The disadvantage of a monthly subscription is that it limits you to one supplier: it can be frustrating to take out a subscription to one provider, only to find that the hotspots in the hotel in which you‘re staying are provided by another.
Another option is to take out a monthly subscription to a reseller such as Trustive, which gives access to hotspots provided by 70 different operators. This is particularly useful if your staff travel abroad a lot. Currently, however, Trustive does not have deals with BT OpenZone or T-Mobile.
Down to the wire
What about Wi-Fi in the workplace? If you are moving into a new office, then it is worth considering dispensing with cables altogether, claims James Walker, product manager of Wi-Fi hardware provider ZyXEL, because installing Wi-Fi can be up to 70% cheaper than installing a cabled network. The newest version of Wi-Fi - 802.11n - is at least twice as fast as previous versions, making it comparable to the speed of a wired network. Although desktop PCs are not always Wi-Fi-enabled, you can buy wireless cards for them for less than £50.
Even if your building is already wired, you can still benefit from adding a handful of wireless access points. You will probably need one or two in each room, as although a signal travels several hundred feet, it can be blocked by walls. As More2 found, you can employ more staff without adding extra cables, and you can enjoy the flexibility of being able to carry a laptop from room to room without worrying about losing your internet connection.
If you do use Wi-Fi, you should be extra aware of security issues, particularly if you are transmitting sensitive data such as customer details over the internet. There are three main security issues with Wi-Fi, says Tony Neate, managing director of Get Safe Online: eavesdropping, hacking and freeloading.
Eavesdropping means that someone within the same range is able to read your emails as they are transmitted. Hacking occurs when people are able to gain access to your computer, while freeloading means that someone is piggybacking your wireless connection for free, giving you only half the bandwidth you have paid for.
There are some basic steps you can take to ensure security (see separate box). But the best way to make sure no one can eavesdrop on your business communications when staff are out and about is to install a virtual private network (VPN), which enables mobile users to connect securely to the office network. "A VPN creates a tunnel of information that goes from one computer to another in a controlled way that nobody else can see," says Neate. The information that is sent is encrypted and cannot be broken into. You can buy VPN software from a supplier such as WatchGuard or SonicWALL and set it up yourself, or ask a provider to do it for you.
Once you get used to having Wi-Fi on the road, it can prove to be frustrating to find yourself without access. You can get around this by also using the mobile phone network, which has almost universal coverage. 3G cards are available for laptops, enabling you to connect to the internet over the mobile phone network, but note that speeds are much slower and costs higher. If a lot of your staff are mobile, you could consider a combined solution, allowing staff to use the mobile phone network when a Wi-Fi hotspot isn‘t available. Some PDAs and laptops will now switch seamlessly between the two.
Most businesses using Wi-Fi now say that they wouldn‘t be without it, and both Nicholson and McVittie believe that having Wi-Fi has helped their company expand. "As a growing business, it really does give you the flexibility to move very quickly and not be stuck by having to go back to the office to send emails," says McVittie. And that could prove priceless for a small company.
