I’ll have free UFB with that coffee, please

Can a café sell more coffee by improving its broadband connection? An Albany based café-owner is finding Ultra-Fast Broadband a boon not only for his business, but that of his customers

It’s 10am and Stephen Martin, head of Albany-based web and social media design company The Website Guys, has a couple of back-to-back meetings about to start. But he doesn’t go to the boardroom via the kitchen to grab a hot drink. Instead he’s off round the corner to Columbus Coffee, where he orders a long black for himself and something for his client, opens his laptop and begins a presentation.

Once the meeting is finished, Stephen checks a few emails and does a bit of work while he waits for his next appointment, then it’s a couple more coffees and another meeting.

Columbus Coffee on William Pickering Drive meets Stephen’s two main criteria for a good café: good coffee and a fast fibre connection.

He needs the former because he’s no great barista himself; the latter is critical because Stephen’s business relies on fast, reliable internet. He likes the relaxed atmosphere of a café; his business has grown a lot recently and now has nine staff, so it’s busy in the office. However, some of the files he shows his clients are big and it isn’t a good look if they won’t open quickly, or the whole thing crashes at 3.30pm when the local kids get home from school.

“I use the internet to stream and show customers videos of what we are doing. And in the middle space between meetings I’m accessing everything on the Cloud through my laptop. It’s all about speed and perception. I need it to be fast, and at Columbus I get the same speeds as if I was in the office.”

MORE: Do you need fibre? Read NBR's special ICT feature

Columbus Coffee William Pickering got Ultra-Fast Broadband in November 2012 - one of the first (if not the first) café in the country on UFB. Owner Danny Wrigley says he signed up to Ultra-Fast Broadband because the guy at retail service provider One Fibre said UFB wasn’t going to cost him any more than his old package. He’s surprised at how fast internet has turned out to be a real boost for his business.

Danny reckons he has between 25 and 40 customers like Stephen using his café as a temporary office on a regular basis. They might be business people based in South Auckland, but with customers on the North Shore and so needing a work base one day a week. Or they might work from home but not want to have to meet clients among the washing-up chaos and the kids. 

“It’s given us a good source of steady revenue. These are people you‘d expect to see at least once a week. They probably have one coffee per person per meeting and if there are two or three tables doing that, that’s 10-15 drinks and the occasional muffin or even lunch.”

Cafés in business areas tend to suffer when the weather is good, he says - why would customers have morning tea or lunch inside when they can go to the beach or the park? But despite the fabulous summer, his turnover hasn’t dropped - and he says having free, Ultra-Fast Broadband on offer is definitely a factor.

He says his 30/10 UFB package (30 Megabits per second download, 10 Mbps upload) costs about $100 a month, which is what he was paying for his old, incomparably slower copper  broadband. And there haven’t  been any internet glitches since the system went in.

Another bonus for his customers - the One Fibre package has unlimited data.

“I travel quite a lot out of Auckland and I’m always looking for a good café with fast, reliable fibre,” Stephen says. “Some cafés, you can tell when their data cap runs out.”