And so it is.
Coffee bars have become the favorite hangout of people who need to make good connections. Be they business connections, family connections or friendship connections, staying "connected" has become the catchphrase of the day – and keeping in touch is made easier with all the gadgets readily available for that purpose.
The cell phone and the laptop have become indispensable tools for staying in touch. And coffee places are the place to go to make good connections. Internet connection, that is. At Gloria Jean’s in Glorietta 3, Madrid points out that most of their customers are businessmen who need to be online all the time, and quickly, too. When they go to Gloria Jean’s they want a cup of coffee, maybe dessert, and a place to sit undisturbed while they hook up to the Net. These guys stay online for an hour at a time, usually.
What kind of coffee do people with laptops order? Coffee of the day is a regular order. Or they might ask for a cappuccino. Getting carried away while doing work is not uncommon and there are times when a customer might stay for three hours. When this happens, Madrid says the customers will ask for a second cup of coffee by the second hour and usually go for a chilled drink before shutting down the laptop.
The move to set up Internet service in cafés like Gloria Jean’s has spurred GlobeQuest, the corporate business group of Innove Communications, to head an aggressive rollout of Wi-Fi service in key places.
"Innove’s vision is to bring the Filipinos to the broadband age. To support this, GlobeQuest provides broadband facilities like Wi-Fi in major key establishments where people converge for business, as well as promote Wi-Fi as a strategic tool for education, local government projects, product advertisements and foreign ventures," said Jesus C. Romero, GlobeQuest head.
Romero added that GlobeQuest has seen to it that the best possible coverage is established prior to a joint certification with the hotspot partners, leaving the establishment accessible to WiZ (Wireless Internet Zone) and ready for use by its customers, ready to sell, and ready to market. In line with this, he said WIZ only uses carrier-grade equipment in its hotspots and in the back-end support systems and is fully managed and monitored seven days a week, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.
During the height of Milenyo, when most of Metro Manila was in the dark, it was Gloria Jean’s that kept many of its customers connected. Madrid said that regulars came in to take advantage of the generator power that they had. They connected to the Net, checked their e-mail and also charged their cell phones, while drinking their favorite brew. Not even a major typhoon will stop Manilans from staying connected! "But it was great to see people making room for other people to get connected," added Madrid. "No one stayed online for longer than an hour at a time."
The advantage of such a service was not lost on GlobeQuest users. GlobeQuest WiZ was the first public Wi-Fi hotspot service in the Philippines to use the Wi-Fi mesh architecture, with the beachfront area of Boracay as its initial market. Mesh architecture provides increased coverage and bandwidth depending on the number of access points deployed and is relatively inexpensive, very reliable and resilient.
"We don’t just put up a WiZ hotspot anywhere. We make sure that all our hotspots are in strategic areas, in the sense that they must be establishments where businessmen and transient Internet users normally converge such as airports, coffee shops, convention centers, golf clubs, resorts and restaurants. We want to be where it matters to our customers," he explained.
At Gloria Jean’s the coffee is 100-percent arabica. Madrid says that they serve nothing but the top two percent of the harvest in the world. "We have coffee from Kenya, Ethiopia, Japan, Jamaica and other countries. We pour our passion into the way we make our coffee, from the time we buy our coffee beans until the time we roast them," said Madrid. "We prepare the coffee in the best way we can for our customers – as far as we are concerned, the preparation is really an art and a science. It is not something that we take lightly."
When a customer enters a Gloria Jean’s, the people at the counter check whether they are carrying a laptop. A customer with a laptop is usually there to do some work. The people with laptops are normally regular customers who want a GlobeQuest voucher of P100. Foreigners who are first-time users of the service normally ask the staff at Gloria Jean’s for some assistance. Trouble-shooting is something that all the staff are familiar with, and they try to help out if a customer is a first-time Wi-Fi user. GlobeQuest has a hotline, too. And, should there be any problem, GlobeQuest personnel will be there right away to get it fixed.
"We have had customers who have done video conferences here," said Madrid. "We have even been witness to a foreigner interviewing another person on-line… Our staff knows that that they are supposed to give customers enough space to do as they want. But that doesn’t stop the staff from coming around and asking if they want anything else." Madrid is happy with the GlobeQuest Wi-Fi. There have been no connection problems in the past year since Gloria Jean’s opened.
GlobeQuest has successfully integrated its Wi-Fi network with leading local Internet Service Provider (ISP) Pacific Internet for the latter’s postpaid subscribers, and three of the world’s leading Wi-Fi network aggregators, namely BOINGO Wireless Inc., iPass, and Deutsche Telekom (DT). As a result, end-users of the said companies will have access to Wi-Fi in all of GlobeQuest’s WiZ hotspots in the Philippines using the username and password issued from their home country.
With iPass, however, all Innove subscribers (GlobeQuest, WorldPass, and Visibility) who travel around the world can also use either dial-up or Wi-Fi in all of iPass’ points of presence (POPs). So far, iPass has integrated over 300 network providers covering over 60,000 access points worldwide including more than 35,000 Wi-Fi hotspot and Ethernet hotel broadband locations in about 60 countries. US-based BOINGO Wireless Inc., which has over 20,000 hotspots, provides high-speed Internet services to its individual end-users and wireless access service providers who intend to resell their Wi-Fi services.
Ahhh… the perfect brew, great company and a connection that works all the time. That calls for another cup.