Work Wise Week: Does working in a pub really work?

In the spirit of Work Wise Week, IT PRO took to the streets to detail what it's really like to work while away from the office.

By Maggie Holland, 21 May 2007 at 17:10

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In a society where customers, including our consumer alter egos, know exactly what they want and where to go if you can't give it to them, the world of work no longer fits neatly into a 9-5 box.

Many professionals will have had some experience of using wireless access to work from home, in coffee shops, airport lounges and more recently on some train lines. IT PRO wanted to see what it would be like to work in one of the types of location being targeted by wireless hotspot providers. So, we headed to the pub to see what was possible and what wasn't.

Finding the right public house for your private office

Most people working away from the office generally know what area they are going to be in and when, so before we set about this experiment, we turned to the web, in this case the search engine of Google to see which pubs in London provided wireless access. In hindsight, we should have gone straight to the source, such as the hotspot directories of The Cloud, T-Mobile and BT Openzone, but being in a hurry as many would be, we went for the Google option.

The results were a mixed bag. Pub directory site Beer in the Evening provided a useful listing of pubs with hotspots, but none of which helped us out in our desired location.

Despite the area of London where IT PRO is based being filled to the brim with media types, most of the wireless options on offer were in pubs much further a field.

Getting Connected

Undeterred, we decided to take a chance and head over to IT PRO's busy local to see how wireless-enabled it was. Either way, we hoped that we might be within range of a useable wireless hotspot, or better still within range of the mother ship's own connection.

When settled in at the pub, the search for wireless connectivity proved a frustrating and ultimately fruitless one.

After refreshing the available network connection list at least 10 times nothing useful happened. All we found were two unsecured computer to computer networks and six security-enabled wireless networks. In addition, we were out of range of our office Wi-Fi offering.

With no connectivity and a desire to remain productive, we used the time to catch up on some unread email that had been cached on the laptop for offline reading. Like many busy professionals today, IT PRO journalists receive a huge amount of email, and just a small portion of each day can be dedicated to reading them, so any 'down time' is potentially good for catching up.

However, such 'down time' is not always a positive for the busy professional who needs to be connected, whether actually or virtually, to the goings on in the office all the time. Times are changing and more places than before are wirelessly-enabled, but there is still a long way to go before we get the kind of pervasive connectivity many both want and need.

Finding room at the inn

IT PRO's experiment was conducted at 4pm on a Thursday afternoon, when the pub in question, a regular venue for impromptu business meetings for a number of companies and professionals, was quite empty and space to work was plentiful. However, one can only imagine that if the situation was rewound to lunchtime or fast forwarded to 6pm, a person and their laptop would have been forced to balance on the edge of someone else's table while standing, or sit outside on the pavement. This makes it all the more surprising that pubs are one of the major sites for wireless hotspots in London and other major cities.