Hundreds Of Tesco Stores Get Superfast Wi-fi

Tesco has turned up the heat on its technology aspirations by rolling out free Wi-Fi to almost a thousand of its largest supermarkets in the UK and Ireland.

The retail giant signed a partnership with BT that sees a free wireless connection powered by the operator available to shoppers in 806 Tesco Extra and Superstores in the UK and 113 stores in the Republic of Ireland.

Shoppers can benefit from BT’s superfast Wi-Fi service that means each store gets bandwidth of up to 76MB and thus a far superior service than the one that the retailer is currently able to offer its customers.

“We were the first supermarket in the UK to offer free Wi-Fi and the first to launch online shopping. We’re now bringing these innovations together to put our customers in control with better service and value than ever before,” said Tomas Kadlec, group technology director at Tesco.

Customers can access the new service right away and any shoppers in store should select either “Tesco Wi-fi” or “BT” [may show up as “BT Openzone” in some stores] to get online. Shoppers can then download Clubcard vouchers, obtain product information, browse recipes and take advantage of in-store offers as well as check social media and surf the web even faster than before.

Even though Tesco’s overall financials have been ailing in recent months, its position in the technology sector is a bright spark with the two versions of its budget tablet performing particularly well. The latest version, the hudl2, went on sale on 9 October priced at just £129 or savvy Clubcard customers can get it for as little as £65 through the Clubcard boost scheme.

It features an 8.3in screen with a 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution, Android KitKat 4.4.2, 16GB of storage, dual-band Wi-Fi, Intel Atom quad-core processor, 5-megapixel camera on the back and a 1.2-megapixel snapper on the front.