trendpreneur

It all started in the Carlton Arms, as many things are wont to do. At least, I think it did. My memories are understandably hazy with time and beer festivals.

The year was 2004. We — a Big Bang Theory-esque group of two mathematicians pretending to be physicists, an engineer/open-source hacker, and computer scientist — had taken up residence in a nice-if-a-little-dated house which just happened to be right across the street from an excellent pub. For reasons beyond my ken, said pub was already the home for a weekly gathering of Cambridge geek types. However, it lacked wifi. Our house had wifi. Rich put these facts together, bought an extra-powerful aerial booster (basically a curved piece of tinfoil attached to some card), and geeks at the Carlton had all the Internet access they could want — provided they bought one of us a pint to get the WEP key. Perfect.

At the time, free wifi wasn’t that common. I remember one other pub in Cambridge ostensibly having it, and a couple of university places. The Cloud was just taking off, too, so paid wifi was on its way around — but beyond our budget as students, and only available at Wetherspoons. So a natural “itch meets scratch” for us was to think… What if we did this for other pubs?

The proposition was thus: We’d create a small, cheap, linux-based wifi base station, and code up a HTTP authentication gateway system (none of the ones we looked at were any good, and we wanted a way for pub owners to keep a changing password behind the bar, or to charge — we’d have a superuser password giving us free access everywhere, of course). We’d sell this into pubs and charge a monthly fee to cover the cost of the box and the inevitable tech support. Ultimately we’d build up a network of accessible locations, starting in Cambridge and expanding further afield to include further cities and types of hostelry.

Sounds pretty familiar now, doesn’t it? (That’s the first Google result I can find, I’ve seen others.)

The value proposition for the business was fairly clear, too: one, it would provide incentive for clientele who wanted to get connected to visit in the first place; two, they’d stick around for longer, thereby ordering more food and drink (in theory). It relies a little on the English habit of self-effacing politeness, that urge that makes us feel “it’s not quite right” to sit somewhere all afternoon with a single pint. Even today this just about works, though on a recent visit to the US, being unable to get a table at a cafe because it was full of patrons with empty cups and laptops, I’m less a fan of the concept.

So what went wrong? Why didn’t we jump on this idea? It could have done well, in retrospect, but there were a couple of problems. Firstly, I think the main one was simply dedication/enthusiasm. It was a nice idea, but we never really took it ’seriously’, we had plenty of other things to do (masters/PhD, hobbies, running student societies, open source, etc). I should have capitalised on my connections to societies like Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, learnt how to write a business plan, and entered it in competitions and the like; instead, I was busy with the most intensive year of study I’ve ever had.

We also lacked funds and in some way a firm vision. We had enough to buy a single box to play with, but never really got beyond that. In a way, we were too geeky; we were excited by playing with a new toy, not selling it. We didn’t identify a target customer (the Carlton would have been perfect) or speak to pub owners to see if there was a market. We didn’t figure out a price point, I think we had the rough concept of about £100 being “ok” in our heads, but we had trouble reconciling costs with that figure.

The vision was also marred by two things: firstly, the DIY “competition”, where the owner’s son/niece/patron just installs a bog standard router costing about £50; secondly, the bespoke/consultant nature of the work we would have to do. The fact that we may have to set up Internet connections and do all sorts of other things for clients (probably a fair concern) when we were pretty much fed up of doing that for friends and family already made it an unappealing vision in ways.

Fundamentally, though, it was really just time and enthusiasm. It was an idea, a project, and not something we really cared about deeply enough to pause and dedicate ourselves to. In retrospect, this was probably the wisest plan, but it’s interesting to look back and realise how much I’ve learned since then about turning an idea into reality. It’s also nice to dream about what the world would be like if every pub you went into worldwide had a Carlton Wireless box in it. It’s also somewhat reassuring to see stories of pub owners being fined for illegal downloading on their free wifi connections, and be glad not to be part of that furore, at least!

(Credit: Reminiscence inspired by Rich’s tweeting of the above ‘fining’ news story.)