Restaurant Brands is working with Walker Wireless on establishing hotspots in its Starbucks outlets, so customers sporting notebooks equipped with wireless capability can surf the net while they sip their chai lattes.
The hotspots should be operational in a couple of months, says Restaurant Brands IT manager Kerry Cross.
The company, which owns New Zealand’s Starbucks, KFC and Pizza Hut licences, signed a deal with Walker Wireless in July for Walker to provide Restaurant Brands with a national virtual private network connecting its call centres and staff and also involving the three chains’ Eftpos terminals.
Up to 900 staff will be using the network at any time and a few more KFC outlets are yet to be connected before the network covers every store, Cross says.
“That will be finished in the next couple of months.”
Planned future developments include an intranet and voice-over-IP technology, Cross says.
“We’ll be piggybacking quite a bit of stuff on to [the VPN].”