O2 today announces it has signed a three year agreement to provide free wifi to the UK’s leading operator of restaurants and pubs with its market-changing public Wifi platform, O2 Wifi. The deal will see O2 Wifi hotspots roll out to Mitchells & Butlers’ 1,600 UK restaurants and pubs across 13 brands including Harvester, Toby Carvery, Vintage Inns, Browns, All Bar One and O’Neill’s, offering guests access to free wifi no matter which mobile or broadband provider they are with.
O2 Wifi is designed to address the many shortcomings of current public wifi offerings by being fast, genuinely free to customers, reliable and simple-to-use. The first hotspots will be initially rolled out to 199 Harvester restaurants by early summer, with rollout to the remaining restaurants and pubs completed by the end of 2012, O2 Wifi will then be available to accompany the 125 million meals and 425 million drinks Mitchells & Butlers serves its guests each year.
O2’s premium wifi hotspots are accessed through a simple sign-up process and are free to both O2 and non-O2 mobile customers, providing seamless connectivity to a high quality network. All hotspots are premium public hotspots, delivering a significantly enhanced user experience, which will soon also allow people to access additional services, including entertainment and mobile payments.
Gavin Franks, MD of O2 Wifi said: ‘Wifi should be about accessing the Internet quickly, seamlessly and, most importantly, where people want to use it. That is why this partnership ‘ with the leading operator of restaurants and pubs in the UK ‘ is such an exciting one. Pub and restaurant-goers will soon be able to receive promotional offers, check the football scores, reply to their emails and update social media sites over a Sunday roast and a pint. Our business strategy is to show fresh thinking to enable new possibilities for our customers, and the hope is that users of O2 Wifi, be it in our partnered venues or through our outdoor hotspots, will now begin to enjoy the full, unrestrained potential of what wifi as a technology can offer.’
Robin Young, Operations Director at Mitchells & Butlers said: ‘Every day in each of our restaurants and pubs our people aim to provide great guest experiences and the availability of free wifi will give us a further opportunity to enhance this. Whether guests visit us to relax over breakfast, brunch or dinner, work away from the office, or have a beer with friends and colleagues, we know from talking to them that free and easy to use wifi is something they want in the restaurant and pub environment.’
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