Starbucks + Google
It has been close to a year now that Starbucks has begun rolling out Google WiFi service to stores around the US and Starbucks customers are benefitting big time. Users are seeing an 18x increase in download speeds and a 6x increase in upload speeds.
Starbucks stores with Google WiFi as tested with SpeedSpot by July 2014.
These results were obtained by analyzing the more than 1000 speed tests shared by SpeedSpot users over the last months from over 650 Starbucks locations around the US. On average Google provides download speeds of 24.9 Mbps and upload speeds of 8.7 Mbps. At&t is only able to provide downloads speeds of 1.3 Mbps and upload speeds of 1.2 Mbps. The difference is pretty incredible especially if one looks at the average connection speeds in the US reported as 10 Mbps (Akamai 2013) and 25.7 Mbps (Ookla 2014). With its move to Google, Starbucks is able to leapfrog their internet services to speeds that are comparable to speeds users expect because they are getting these speeds at the home or the office.
Starbucks stores with At&t WiFi as tested with SpeedSpot by July 2014.
While the US is still struggling to keep up with high speed broadband compared to the rest of the world, Starbucks is doing its best to counter this trend and deliver top notch internet performance to its customers for free. In July 2013 Starbucks announced it will begin bringing Google WiFi to new Starbucks location first and will then continue the roll out to its over 7,000 US stores. If the time frame is still valid the transition which is supposed to take about 18 month should be completed by Spring of 2015.
For a long time Starbucks problem was that the bottleneck of its internet services actually was not the speed its WiFi routers are working with (802.11 g/n) but the broadband connection it was hooked up to. As reported by Shara Tibken for cnet Starbucks stores used to be connected with a single T1 line providing 1.5 Mbps throughput. This is definitely no longer the case, as the goal of the new roll out was to increase speeds at least by 10x which is more than the case with the 18x increase we measured.
The highest reported download speed comes from the Starbucks @ Orchards Market Center in Vancouver, WA clocking it at a staggering 72.8 Mbps down and 17.7 Mbps up while the highest report upload speed comes from the Starbucks, 25175 Madison Ave in Murrieta, CA with speeds of 54 Mbps down and 39.1 Mbps up. These speeds are probably more influenced now by the bottleneck between the customers phone and the router than by the connection between the router and the internet. So if you need even higher speeds now, you will have to move closer to the router but not anymore to a store with faster internet.
To find out if your Starbucks has already made the leap take a look at the SSID (Service Set Identifier) of Starbucks WiFi network. If it is still „attwifi“ you are out of speed luck but if it is reading „Google Starbucks“ get ready to get on the super speed way that is the new internet at Starbucks.
The measurement errors on the reported values are less than 10%.
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