Dorchester Town Centre in Dorset UK Deploys Free Public WiFi

Investment from the Dorchester Business Improvement District (BID), local councils and Brewery Square has enabled a free public WiFi wireless internet network to be deployed by a company called Fusion Wi-Fi across Dorchester’s town centre in Dorset (England).

The service was installed by placing network access points on local CCTV columns and building walls, which were then hooked into a public fibre optic broadband network that was partly provided by the local Superfast Dorset project, which is also supported by both the government’s Broadband Delivery UK programme and Openreach (BT).

The move follows recent research, which claims to have shown that 1 in 4 people are more likely to stay longer in a town centre if it offers free WiFi. The fact that parts of central Dorchester can also suffer from flaky 4G coverage may lend some weight to that prediction.

Phil Gordon, Dorchester BID Project Director, said:

“This has been a great example of how a BID can work well in partnership with all the local councils and businesses to achieve a valuable resource for the town.

We already know it’s useful as during the pre-launch testing phase we have had more than 6,000 logins by over 2,000 unique users. People are not having to eat into their monthly data bundles with the free service . . . especially welcome to those with pay as you go contracts.

People can now use the internet in town to discover all the shops, attractions and find their way to them easily using Google maps or other on-line products. It should really help with communications in town too, as we will be able to alert users to events taking place that they could otherwise miss.”

At launch the new network covers Dorchester’s main shopping streets, Brewery Square and the popular Borough Gardens.