Supermarket giant Tesco has confirmed that it is running trials of a FREE Wireless ( Wi-Fi ) internet access service in 4 out of its 2,700 UK branches. Plans are already being drawn up for a national rollout, although this will depend upon the success of their pilot.

The service, which was first hinted at by The Grocer magazine, would also offer customers an easy way to compare in-store products and prices. However Tesco's CIO, Mike McNamara, warned that anybody caught "streaming video all day" would probably be "switched off".

Tesco already uses Wi-Fi for its own in-store operations and thus believes that any deployment of a public service would be fairly easy to implement.