For many businesses and public spaces, a free Wi-Fi connection has become essential. If you want to encourage people to stick around, whether it’s to create a positive atmosphere, to encourage people to finish their drink and get a refill, or let someone enjoy a quiet meal alone, a Wi-Fi connection lets these people connect their phones and laptops to a much less expensive service than their mobile provider. And if you don’t have a connection, your guests will either head out early or find somewhere else to relax and eat.
However, Wi-Fi connections based on cable internet has its own limitations. The top speed advertised by the cable internet provider is a best-case scenario: since you share a cable internet connection with your neighbors, everyone can start lagging when one business on the block starts using a lot of it at once. In other words, if your plaza has a laundromat, a coffee shop, and a bookstore, all of them may experience a lot of slowdown in the afternoons and weekends when all their customers show up at the same time.
That’s why fiber internet providers like JumpFiber make a point of offering dedicated connections to our residential and commercial customers. With us, your internet speed won’t reflect how much your neighbors are downloading, and so when you get a 500 Mbps connection or a gigabit line, you won’t have to worry about sharing it with others. Your customers will have to share, however, since they’re all using your fiber connection through Wi-Fi, but they’ll be too busy getting floored by the download speeds to notice.
While free Wi-Fi connections started out as a courtesy for laptop users who would go write at coffee shops, the spread of smartphones and online streaming has made this courtesy essential for businesses that want to keep bringing in customers. And while an older cable connection has done well enough to provide that Wi-Fi until now, businesses that don’t switch to fiber internet providers when available will soon find themselves left in the dust.