On Public Wi-Fi and Consumers: The Shared Value and the Value of Sharing

The rapid growth of shared Wi-Fi in the U.S. service and retail sector has presented consumers with a free connectivity resource of remarkable breadth and quality. It has also created a huge customer engagement opportunity for the brands which make it available.

How often do you check your smartphone when you’re out in public? For many of us, reaching for our smartphones has become a reflex action; whenever there are minutes — or even seconds — to kill, we’re back at it.

You’re in a grocery store queue: you check your phone. You’re waiting for a friend on an evening out: you check your phone. It’s date night and you shouldn’t be checking your phone: you check your phone.

So ubiquitous has the demand for data connectivity become that to be without it is now an almost intolerable frustration.

Brick and mortar brands from across retail and service sectors have responded cannily by building connectivity into their in-store experiences. Shared Wi-Fi — once a coffee shop phenomenon — has become almost universal.

The top 40 brands we surveyed delivered 68 years of cumulative connectivity to our sample base in November 2015 alone.

But just how good is this connectivity? And how are consumers using it? In a study drawing on anonymized data gathered from more than 350,000 U.S. smartphones in November 2015, Popwifi set about finding some answers. Here are some of those findings.

• Assessed by sector, restaurants and fast food chains serve up the best quality shared Wi-Fi in the U.S. Eleven of the top 20 brands we surveyed for Wi-Fi Quality of Service (QoS) were either restaurant or fast food chains. BJ’s Brewhouse and Restaurant, and Italian dining chain Olive Garden, topped both the restaurant and overall listings, while Taco Bell and Burger King led the fast food field.
• Hard on the heels of the eateries were department stores, general retail, and grocery stores. Among the leaders here were Lowe’s, Michael’s and Macy’s, which joined BJ’s and Olive Garden in the top five brands overall for Wi-Fi QoS.

Podium finishes aside, the bigger picture is that quality is high in numerous locations. We measured Wi-Fi quality on a scale of zero to one, with anything above 0.6 representing a connection easily able to handle streaming video to a smartphone. The top 40 brands from our survey provided Wi-Fi ranging between 0.96 and 0.61 on our scale.

No doubt in part because of the quality on offer, consumers live up to their name when they get connected to shared Wi-Fi.

The top 40 brands by number of unique devices connected delivered 13.5 Terabytes of data to our sample base in November alone. Measured instead by cumulative hours of usage, those 40 brands delivered 68 years of connectivity to our sample base in just one month.

In-store Wi-Fi has the potential to be used as an active enabling platform, providing a direct, branded communication channel between merchant and customer.

By comparing volumes of data consumption with hours of connectivity delivered, we were also able to deduce the locations at which smartphone users consume data most intensively. Shared Wi-Fi pioneer Starbucks kept the coffee shop flag flying, reasserting its brand association with connectivity by topping the chart for this metric.

These statistics give a very real sense of the value of this connectivity to the consumer, particularly when you consider how difficult it can often be to get a decent data connection from the mobile network at many indoor locations.

But what does it mean to the brands which provide it? Because it is in demand and gratefully received, shared Wi-Fi has enormous potential value for these brands, far beyond its role as a customer experience value-add.

In-store Wi-Fi can be used as an active enabling platform, providing a direct, branded communication channel between merchant and customer. From the delivery of a simple welcome notification on the customer’s arrival, to far more sophisticated, contextual engagement — real-time and location-aware — the real potential of Wi-Fi is now starting to be discovered.

Consumers’ mobile usage habits have shifted from passive — checking the phone only when alerted of the need to do so — to active; initiating outbound data sessions at every available opportunity. In-store Wi-Fi was deployed initially as a passive customer amenity but the networks themselves are now being seen in terms of an active role. Merchants can use their networks to reach out to their customers, just as their customers use the networks to reach out to their favorite content and services.

The data uncovered by the Popwifi Survey shows the quality of shared Wi-Fi available, the scale of its deployment, and the consumer hunger for the connectivity on offer.

The next evolutionary phase for shared Wi-Fi will stem from the understanding that the value of a connection flows in more than one direction.

The Popwifi report Making Connections: Wi-Fi in the U.S. Retail Sector is available for download at www.popwifi.com/news