Content area
Full text
After years of searching, George Polk of The Cloud believes he's finally found a winning wireless concept. And it could soon be coming to a pub near you. Profile Justin Pearse.
What do yachtsmen, travelling salesmen from Northampton and the man leaning against the bar in your local pub have in common? They're all targets of George Polk's vision to bring Wi-Fi Web access to every corner of the UK.
Polk is wirelessly enabling everywhere, from pubs to marinas, enabling visitors to sit down, open their laptop or PDA and get surfing without a cable or modem in sight.
With The Cloud, part of gaming machine giant Leisure Link, Polk is creating the first truly nationwide Wi-Fi wholesale network, on top of which service providers like BT and the mobile operators will offer branded consumer services. The huge real estate available to Polk, through the vast number of pubs that have Leisure Link machines installed, forms the bedrock of this network. BT Openzone is the first service provider to sign up; commercial services launched last week. The Cloud has already installed 1,500 sites and is opening new ones at the rate of 200 a week.
All of which is a long way from studying ancient Mongolian history at Harvard. But Polk has been searching for the perfect wireless business for years. Now he's convinced he's found it. And he's excited. Understandably, as Wi-Fi is without a doubt one of the hottest areas in the wireless world today.
Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) is shorthand for a wireless local-area network, which provides Internet connections up to 10 times faster than a standard dial-up at a range of about 300 feet. Sounds great, but surely your local pub isn't a natural habitat for Web surfers?
It's a question Polk is getting used to and immediately fires back his own: "If you were a travelling salesman in Northampton with a spare half an hour between meetings, where would you go to access the Web?"
It's a good point and suddenly the pub is looking like a pretty good bet.
"I've tested it and it's really not such a surprising thing to people in the pub," says Polk. He turns the question on its head by...