In this day and age of 24/7 accessibility, a person’s ability to connect to the Internet – to check e-mail, find news updates, research stock tips or check a schedule – can be crucial. With that in mind, Stop & Shop Supermarket has unveiled a plan to provide wireless-fidelity (Wi-Fi) access in its stores.
ICOA, a broadband wireless Internet provider based in Warwick, was chosen to install the necessary infrastructure after a trial period at Stop & Shop’s corporate headquarters last summer.
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The first store in Dorchester, Mass., was brought online in December and provides access in a 34-seat café.
Jennifer Nieman, a consultant for ICOA, said the company started working with Stop & Shop in August.
“What [Stop & Shop] is looking to do is bring [people] off the street into their café area and provide a free service as an amenity to them,” she said.
ICOA installed enterprise-class equipment from Colubris, a wireless network company in Waltham, Mass., that can support virtual private networks, which allow a person to securely log into their corporate servers from a remote location. The system also provides content delivery services that improve the speed of downloading text and graphics from a Web page.
Through the agreement, ICOA offers network monitoring, content filtering – that allows only Web surfing that is family friendly – and a live call center to respond to any problems, said Nieman. The arrangement also allows the company to maintain its brand as the main advertising on the initial sign-in page.
ICOA powers Wi-Fi for restaurants and supermarkets around the country, including Panera Bread, Denny’s, Giant Food Stores and Kroger Company. ICOA also provides Wi-Fi access at 27 airports nationwide that serve more than 65 million passengers annually.
Robert Keane, a Stop & Shop spokesperson, said right now the Wi-Fi offering is only at one store as part of a testing phase, but the plan is to expand to more stores throughout the year. The most important requirement for providing Wi-Fi in the store is a seating area, said Keane, noting that service will not be provided in a store without a sit-down area.
Store officials also look at different demographic indicators like age, income and an area’s overall technological know-how.
The Dorchester store was chosen because it was a new store, already had a high customer volume and offered a seating area, said Keane.
“Stop & Shop is all about one-stop shopping and customer convenience,” said Keane. “Our basic mission is to offer our customers as many goods and services as possible, and Wi-Fi is part of that,” he said. The Wi-Fi service is ideal for businesspeople on the go or casual Internet users, said Keane.
ICOA and Stop & Shop declined to reveal the cost of setting up the Wi-Fi service or the usage numbers thus far. However, the store did reveal that there will be no outside advertising on the server and the cost of the installation was footed by Stop & Shop. This should not affect prices charged in the store, Keane added.
The store also is promoting a line of prepared foods that can be heated in the store or food that is already hot that customers can have in the café while surfing the Internet.
A 2004 report from Texas-based Wi-Fi Alliance, a nonprofit trade association dedicated to promoting the growth of wireless access, predicted that by 2007 there would be 530,000 “hot spots” throughout the country.
Research from Boingo Wireless Inc, a software and wireless technology firm in Santa Monica, Calif., is more optimistic. According to the company, there are nearly 2 million potential hot spots in the United States with more than half being classified as retail stores.
