WiFi A Manger at Pret A Manger – Free WiFi with your coffee at Pret

10 Comments

by Mike Butcher on December 15, 2008

As of today coffee chain Pret A Manger is offering consumers free WiFi in 60 stores in the UK, with all its 130 stores expected to be WiFi-d up in December. After a six-month trial, they selected The Cloud to provide the access, which will be “restriction free”. This will make a change from having to hunt down paid-for WiFi in places like Starbucks, which has a deal with T-Mobile. MacDonalds provides WiFi in many UK stores already, but it looks like Pret is the first national coffee chain to move on free WiFi. Handy for startups…

Comments

Alex Housley - December 15th, 2008 at 2:50 pm GMT-1

This is great news – well done to The Cloud and Pret! I really hope this initiative is a success, and for many more leading chains to follow in the near future.

There are now more ways to connect whilst mobile, which means the traditional pay-as-you-go and subscription wi-fi business models have to change in order to compete with technologies such as 3G.

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Peter - December 15th, 2008 at 3:07 pm GMT-1

great photo for the article btw.

about time the UK had free wifi, starbucks is crazily expensive.

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Dave Butler - December 15th, 2008 at 5:13 pm GMT-1

Great to see another chain seeing the sense in having free wifi. MacD’s, Coffee Republic and Wetherspoons beat them to it though!

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neuhausen - December 16th, 2008 at 7:51 pm GMT-1

well this laptop is such a nice stuff. I simply love it.

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Jon M Bishop - December 18th, 2008 at 9:33 am GMT-1

This is such good news that it inspired me to draw a cartoon about it: http://www.jonin60seconds.com/blog/2008/12/17/know-where-to-get-free-wifi-across-uk.html

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Greg - December 24th, 2008 at 10:24 am GMT-1

“Restriction free” for 60 minutes…

Hopefully I can just change my mac address and log back in with new details when my session runs out.

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