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A restaurant chain hopes to provide its employees and
customers greater access to the Internet throughout
Western Canada through the installation of wireless
access points. Vancouver-based Earls Restaurants, which
has more 50 locations in British Columbia, Alberta and
Saskatchewan, said Tuesday it had completed a WiFi project
with FatPort Inc., also in Vancouver.
Earls will be offering wireless Internet access to
corporate customers, who regularly book business lunches,
but a key driver for the initiative was to support its
own executives, according to director of IT services
Brad Brooks.
Each restaurant has its own office but they're often
quite small, and district managers, for example, travel
regularly to various locations with laptops in tow.
"There's no place for them to go into the back and check
e-mail," he said. Brooks said Earl needed to provide
Internet access without creating an additional strain
on his IT department.
The company has also been watching WiFi deployments
at Fairmont Hotels, Coastal Resorts and fast food giant
McDonald's, he said. "If I knew that Earls had wireless
access as a traveller or as a guy making sales calls
-- like I did in my previous life -- I would eat in
a restaurant that had that," he said. "It's one more
way that we can service our customer."
FatPort marketing manager Malcolm McDonald said WiFi
could be particularly attractive during the mid-afternoons,
which tend to be a quiet time at restaurants like Earls'.
"We are definitely see more and more restaurants jumping
on this WiFi bandwagon," he said. "Especially in lunch,
there's a big drive towards business lunch meetings
and they need something to be able to attract their
customers."
Earls has been using DSL
high-speed Internet access for several years and
already had much of the necessary infrastructure in
place, Brooks said. FatPort simply had to install a
microwave transmitter at each location. "The hardest
part was simply getting there," said McDonald. "Last
week I was up in Fort McMurray (B.C.), of all places
to install a restaurant -- a restaurant that took 20
minutes but that I had to be at Fort McMurray for two
days, because that's how the airlines ran."
The FatPort connection rests outside the company's
firewall. Brooks acknowledged that there are still some
security concerns around the technology, but they are
no more than what you would expect from WiFi access
in any other public place. "All of us runs over SSL
to our corporate office, so we just overcame that, because
internally it didn't matter to us," he said.
Earls was attracted to FatPort by its range of industry
partners and also by its rates, which he described as
more than fair. "I think that rates will probably come
down over the next few years," he said. A number of
other Canadian restaurant chains have also started to
offer WiFi Internet access over the last year, including
Lone Star Texas Grill and Big Daddy's Crab Shack & Oyster
Bar based in Ottawa.
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