Wi-Fi and Our Journey
It is our hope and focus to always be open with the Two Story community regarding our business and our decisions. Like all businesses we should constantly be striving to enhance your experience within our doors. However, unlike many businesses, we truly want to ensure that we are striving for this—for you.
With this in mind, one of our greatest frustrations for you and us has been the Wi-Fi within Two Story. There is no hiding the constant drops in service, the inability for you to connect, our incapacity to accept credit cards, etc. As a community gathering place in this age, we need to be able to offer you a reliable Internet connection to ensure that you can study, work, check your emails, or stay connected with your friends when you are here and do this regardless of how many other Two Story friends and customers are also trying to do so.
We have made attempts in the past to add access points and replace hardware to fix the issue of “poor Internet.” We have even contracted out I.T. Professionals who have been unable to deliver and subsequently dropped the job. But, we believe that we have once, and hopefully, for all remedied this issue.
You may have noticed that in the past 3 or 4 weeks from writing this, that the Internet connection has been more stable and reliable. We finally found a piece of hardware through the help of Connected Technologies (a local I.T. Provider) that has been able to enhance your Wi-Fi experience greatly! Consequently, we have experienced zero (0) downtime on a whole!
We hope this has proven helpful to you and that you have been able to notice a difference. However, we are taking this one step further. We are partnering with Wandering Wifi, an Atlanta based Wi-Fi solutions company to bring an even faster, more stable, and more reliable hotspot to Two Story. Quite honestly, compared to your experience in the past month, we (Two Story) may be the ones to truly gain an advantage by making this switch to Wandering Wifi. They will be able to offer support and scalable potential for our Wi-Fi needs as our business grows and expands. It is a vital business relationship that we are thankful to have from this point forward. And we can expect the new Wi-Fi to be in place and functioning by the middle of March.
Partner With Us
We would like to ask for your help and support as well. One of the issues that arise for a business who offers free Wi-Fi is the tendency for patrons to utilize the Internet for hours without patronizing the business. Two Story has a unique house and location that makes it extremely conducive for studying and work, and this was our initial and current vision for Two Story. But, even a house this size has a tendency to reach capacity quickly.
Whether you are here only briefly or for a full day of studying, working, or socializing, please help Two Story by patronizing our coffee bar for food and drink.
It is our hope and strong goal to keep the Internet open and free to our community. When being faced with the decisions to charge for Internet or require our customers to retrieve a password at the bar to access the Internet, we are choosing to keep the Internet open and free at Two Story. While requiring each patron to visit the bar for a password would enhance our sales, we believe that it would hurt our mission as a community-gathering place, and our mission will always come first.
For this reason, we simply want to be able to offer this space, coffee, conversation, and community for many years to come. So, please partner with us by visiting our bar as you utilize this incredible space. I mean grabbing a cup of coffee can’t be that bad…
Chris
March 5th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
I’m glad that you guys have finally gotten this sorted out. I’m a Computer Science major, so most of what I need to do involves the use of the internet. So, I wasn’t in two story all that often last semester during the internet blackout.
To be honest, I would not complain about retrieving a password from a receipt from the counter. To be honest, I always buy something when I’m there because I just can’t resist the smell anyway! But I do think that if people were required to enter a code to get on - the quality of service would actually be improved because people in the adjacent apartments wouldn’t be able to leech on the connection.
I have some cool ideas about this, and I might just do a blog post about it… if I do I’ll pingback this post so you guys can see it.
March 6th, 2010 at 10:51 am
Matt, thank you for your comment. I would love to hear your ideas, especially as they pertain to providing a more quality internet Wi-Fi at Two Story.
I’m sorry that this kept you out last semester with more regularity than it brought you in. Hopefully, we can reverse this trend and see you with a cup of Two Story Coffee in hand more often!
Again, please share your thoughts and ideas with me. I would love to hear them. Thanks, Matt.
March 8th, 2010 at 11:48 pm
[...] by the recent 2Story blog post on Wi-Fi I’ve been prompted to think about how Wi-Fi has evolved in recent years. Over the [...]