Best Practices For Free Wi-Fi In Your Coin Laundry

     Offering customers free Wi-Fi in your coin laundromat is an excellent way to keep them coming back and to attract new customers. Free internet adds to the convenience of your establishment and will set you apart from the competition in a unique way. There are a couple things to consider before installing free Wi-Fi at your coin laundry. In this blog post we’ll discuss the best practices of providing free Wi-Fi.

Getting Set Up

     Setting up free Wi-Fi in your coin laundromat isn’t difficult, but you have to make sure you choose the right equipment. You will need to purchase a quality router along with an Internet service package that has enough bandwidth to support all of your customers. Not all plans are meant to support multiple users at once.

     Your service plan should also be able to provide fast load speeds, because free Wi-Fi is useless to your customers if it’s not reliable. How much will all of this cost? It’s difficult to provide an estimate because prices vary by location. To find out, contact your local service providers and they will help you find the best package for your needs.

     To ensure you’re getting the best deal, we recommend calling around town and comparing prices. The providers will ask you how many customers you expect to be using the internet at any given time, so you should be prepared to answer this question. This information will ultimately determine which plan you will need.

Blocking Illegal Sites

It’s a sad truth that some of your customers will try to use your free Wi-Fi to access websites containing pornography or illegally downloadable movies and music. It’s not uncommon for business owners who provide internet access to receive legal notices stating that they are responsible for illegally downloaded content.  

     There are steps you can take to minimize this threat. When you first set it up, you can manually configure your router to restrict any dangerous websites using parental controls. Using this feature you can select specific types of sites that you don’t want your customers to have access to.

     If after setting up and testing these restrictions you’d still like more protection, consider using a content filtering system like OpenDNS for added security. This service can be configured with your router to block porn sites as well as sites with illegal downloads.

Preventing Loitering

     Some coin laundry owners have found that since they started providing free Wi-Fi to their customers, they’ve encountered an increasing loitering problem in and around their stores. A simple and effective remedy to the issue of so-called “Wi-Fi squatters” is to limit the amount of time each user can spend online.

     Using a device called a “hotspot gateway” you can virtually kick people off the network when their time limit expires, whether you want that to be 30 minutes or two hours. A hotspot gateway will further help you manage access to your network, and there are a number of hotspot gateway manufacturers on the internet.  

SEE ALSO: 5 LAUNDRY ESSENTIALS YOU SHOULD SELL

     Free cable used to be the best perk available to laundromat customers, but more and more stores are now opting for free internet. By taking the right steps to provide free Wi-Fi (with appropriate restrictions), you can significantly increase foot traffic to your coin laundromat. Check out this article to learn more about the benefits of offering free internet in your store.