British Library boasts London's largest WiFi hotspot

The British Library has launched wireless Internet connectivity in the public areas of its building at St Pancras.

The service offers wireless Internet access (WiFi) throughout the 11 reading rooms, the auditorium, the café and restaurant and the outdoor Piazza area.

The mainly indoor WiFi zone will allow the 3,000 visitors the Library receives each day to connect to the internet and access email using either their existing service provider or by using the Library's own pay-as-you-go service.

Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, said: “At the British Library we are continually exploring ways in which technology can help us to improve services to our users. All of us are more reliant than ever upon information and communications technology and we increasingly expect to be able to have access to that technology whenever and wherever we need it."

Building Zones, consultants in providing technology that changes the way people use buildings, were commissioned to conduct a user study with the aim of identifying the computing equipment that visitors were bringing to the Library and their needs for wireless Internet connectivity.

The study revealed that almost nine-out-of-10 visitors had a laptop; the average dwell-time in the building was six hours; but that many users were leaving the library to go to a nearby Internet café to access their email. Some 16% of the visitors used the library as a business centre.

The survey concluded that there was an overwhelming demand for the service. Email was the most requested application and visitors preferred to access this from their own equipment rather than a fixed terminal. Continued access to the British Library catalogue was also a requirement.

Building Zones partnered with The Cloud and Hewlett Packard (HP) to roll out the building infrastructure, network and user support services.

A trial service registered 1,200 sessions per week making The British Library central London 's most active, and largest, public WiFi hotspot.

The new wireless service is operated independently from the existing Library private network infrastructure, therefore ensuring there is no security risk to critical business applications and that the Library's private network is protected from laptop borne viruses or local hackers.

(SP/GMCG)