E-pub - Going wireless

Wireless technology. It's the best thing since the wireless. Which seemed to have loads of wires. But it enabled human beings to communicate across distances, something we have strived to do for millennia - take smoke signals, semaphore, carrier pigeons.

Now we're really getting somewhere, though. Nearly everybody has a mobile phone and many pubs are wi-fi hotspots that enable customers to surf the internet without having to plug in their laptop.

The potential is greater than this, though. How about a pub with mobile tills, for instance? It's not so far off. The technology is there to make your premises a wireless local area network (WLAN) that not only uses Wi-Fi to link all your tills, including hand-held terminals, to the back office but also provides wireless machine management, wireless CCTV systems and more.

You'd certain save on a lot of wires.

In fact, a system which already goes some way to the wireless pub is already under secret trials at a Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries (W&DB) pub. It's called Aphelion and it's the brainchild of Europacom, a company that for the past decade has helped organisations reduce their telephone bills through what is called "converged telecommunications", making the most efficient use of the lines you have available. As well as W&DB it works with Hall &Woodhouse, Wadworth, Tattersall Castle Group and Hook Norton.

Now that broadband is here, of course, the opportunities to do that have multiplied. You can think of a broadband line as being made up of a thick bundle of "tunnels" through which both voices and data can be transmitted.

The trick is managing it so that all those bits of communication don't get in each other's way. That's one of the jobs Europacom does, but as part of that sales director Barry Hodge is looking to develop the wireless pub.

And the way in, as he sees it, is through the growth in table service.

"Staff not only taking orders at the table but taking payment through hand-held chip & PIN terminals will become standard in the industry," he says. "In effect there will be mobile tills. And because they won't have to pay for cabling pubs will be able to have many more payment points, including in the garden.

"There's enough bandwidth in a WLAN site to have many different tunnels in one broadband connection. Then it's about how we best use the bandwidth they've got and add to it."

With all that money flying around wirelessly security is a big issue. Through Aphelion Europacom aims not only to install an effective WLAN at a pub but to manage the whole process from till to bank, as Barry puts it "de-risking the supply chain".

And wireless tills, he hopes, are just the beginning. Europacom's Gold Service gives licensees the opportunity to put wireless broadband to up to 16 separate uses including laptops and stock control while the Platinum adds public access Wi-Fi.

For more information go to Europacom.net​