Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting Group Inc., said he sees the move as a win-win.

The cost analysis for offering the service for free "makes sense if you're going to offer wireless service. The incentive is wireless service. And it's even more of an incentive if it's free," IHL Consulting's Buzek said.

"And if it's free, there could be more traffic than if there were a charge for the service. It makes total sense. The retailer could just drop in a router."

Buzek added that offering a free service also reduces another major wireless access nightmare: customer objections to service problems.

"When it's free, they don't have the same level of headaches if it's down," he said. "If someone goes to use their T-Mobile device and then can't, there are complaints. But if it's free, the customer doesn't have much of a leg to stand on if there's a problem."

Another analyst—Lance Wilson, director of wireless research for ABI Research—questioned whether the cost of managing wireless access would truly match or exceed the likely fees to be generated and speculated that Krystal's decision was purely a marketing call based on a belief that its customers wouldn't likely pay for such a service.

"Because of the nature of its clientele, Starbucks, which is upscale, can charge for [wireless access] and get away with it," Wilson said. "This chain, they know their customer base very well. Their customers may not pay for it. We probably have here a very savvy company that has correctly interpreted that they would not garner a tremendous amount of revenue from this."

As for the high costs associated with selling wireless access, Wilson said there are many "automated payment systems for wireless connectivity that are well-entrenched and that can handle [payments] seamlessly. There are a number of vendors that offer these systems. I think this has more to do with their customer base."

The chain's wireless access will be free—whatever the motivation—but surfing will have its limitations. The chain is using filtering software from St. Bernard Software Inc. to match requested domains against a list of domains that the ISV thinks are not family-friendly, Reid said.

"One of the concerns we had was that Krystal is family-friendly and we wanted to keep it that way," Reid said. "We didn't want someone at one table seeing an image on a laptop at another table" that might be offensive, including weapons or pornography.

But while Reid is proud of the wireless access he'll be offering his customers, he's keeping all store systems—including POS, inventory and credit card processing—on traditional hard-wired connections.

The chain opted for DSL and cable modem connections in almost all locations. One site needed satellite for broadband, and it is somewhat difficult to deploy. "It's almost like a radio transmitter. It needs to be within a mile of the people providing the connection and it has to be line of sight," Reid said.

As the broadband connections were installed, they disconnected the store's phone lines—using one of the DSL lines for voice communications, where possible—adding to the cost-effectiveness of the program.

"None of our internal operations are using the wireless. It's fully segregated from the public traffic," Reid said. "We didn't want anybody to sit in our dining room and try to break into our system."

The internal traffic will be using the public Internet as the pipe, and Reid is confident that Krystal's VPN will adequately protect the data traffic. But, he said, he is realistic about the lack of a huge incentive for someone to really try hard to break in.

"We try and keep in mind our place in the world," the CIO said. "We're selling burgers."

Retail Center Editor Evan Schuman can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.

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