Enjoy bandwidth with a latte

By RICHARD WOOD

Starbucks customers in Auckland and Christchurch can take bandwidth with their lattes thanks to a deal with Reach Wireless for a "hot spot" wireless system for five of the chain's 35 New Zealand stores.

Coffee drinkers can use wireless-enabled notebooks or handheld computers to access the internet at high speed using 802.11b or WiFi technology. Under the three-month trial New Zealand Starbucks is giving away five megabytes of bandwidth usage for every "grande" sized coffee or other beverage. This might allow, for example, the downloading of a hundred emails, or one or two MP3 songs.

Additional megabytes can also be purchased starting at $5 for 10MB using a credit card online.

Starbucks began offering WiFi services in the United States a year ago and local Starbucks marketing manager Alistair Kirk said its experience had been positive.

The firm would be looking closely at customers' response locally but was not interested in becoming an "internet cafe" of the style that had PC workstations.

"Our business is coffee and always will be," he said.

Starbucks is using Telecom's Jetstream to connect out to the internet, with in effect 4-6Mbps bandwidth being shared by any concurrent cafe users.

The deal is part of a network of roamable wireless hot spots under Reach's pre-pay billing system. Reach's website displays a map of 17 hotspot locations in Auckland, and lists six.

General manager Steve Simms claims a total of "just over 20" out of a target of 200 by the end of year.

Of the newly enabled Starbucks stores, the four Auckland locations are at Downtown shopping centre, Queen St, Parnell and Newmarket.

Kirk said the site in Christchurch in Cashel Mall might be the South Island's first public hot spot.

Reach is owned by Unicall Communications, which is owned by Argent Networks chief executive Chris Jones. Argent supplies Reach with billing software.

A prospective hot spot provider can buy Reach's "hot spot in a box" for $979 a site, be automatically connected to Reach's billing system, and buy vouchers to sell.

Reach can provide the fast internet services to the provider through Telecom's Jetstream, starting at $89 a month.

Simms said the huge cost of a billing system would make it hard for a competitor to create a rival network.

Reach Wireless