[3GScottishUser]

McDonald's have dumped their deal with BT Openzone as it has not brought them any benefit.

They will roll out free Wi-Fi provided by 'The Cloud' in all of their resturants in the UK by December 2007.

Free Wi-Fi on your N-?? whilst you feast on your BigMac... Yum...Yum...

Perhaps the Wi-Fi won't attract many initially but as word spreads they could sell a few meals with the bits on offer.

:)

[Ben]

Well, there'll be plenty of people standing outside McDonalds, but will anyone go in? :p

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/08/mcdonalds_wireless/

[3g-g]

Go to Tescos, get your Sushi, park in the McDonalds car park, use free WiFi, enjoy lunch. Done.

[gorilla]

I'm dubious. Revoultion bars in Manchester are offering free wifi, but it wouldn't work with the N95's browser (your browser's not compatible...). Anyway, after faffing around trying to get it to work, I realised I would have saved a few minutes just using the '3' connection.

Back to the OP. Yes this is what we need more of. There are so few places (outside of London) offering up free wifi that the concept has been lost on me.

HandsOn is a big fan of students saving money (he must be feeling the pinch!) so I can only imagine that in student areas, businesses offering free wifi can almost guarantee to have bums on seats. Whether they generate enough revenue is another matter, but plenty of students have wifi enabled laptops and plenty of students already go to bars/cafes etc to ensure that the cost of supplying free wifi wouldn't be prohibitive.

Can I say, well done Maccy D's?

[Hands0n]

HandsOn is a big fan of students saving money (he must be feeling the pinch!) so I can only imagine that in student areas, businesses offering free wifi can almost guarantee to have bums on seats. Whether they generate enough revenue is another matter, but plenty of students have wifi enabled laptops and plenty of students already go to bars/cafes etc to ensure that the cost of supplying free wifi wouldn't be prohibitive.

Can I say, well done Maccy D's?

If you saw me you wouldn't think me a student :eek: It has been many a year since I boogied on down at the local Poly (now that is an indication of my age!!).

I do see an absolutely huge market for Students and those in rented accommodation where the proposition of fixed-line ADSL is a non-starter. For these people some mode of wireless Broadband is going to be a real benefit. Take-up of such an offer will be extraordinary if, and only if, the price is right. But to date the mobile networks have felt no need to appeal to that end of the market. Even though in doing so they will see ARPU increase favourably. And so, with few exceptions, the mobile data business malingers along slowly, very slowly.

Fast forward to whenever - and I forsee a very bright future to the network operator that inspires the take up of Data on their network - sensibly priced and sensibly packaged (no silly sub-Gigabyte caps). The trouble is that, to date, the mobile networks have been singly unable to strike that magic balance between price and capacity. Instead they have priced mobile data like it is platinum dust. To be bought at a premium price, and for miniscule unusable amounts.

I applaud MacDonalds for doing this for whatever reasons they chose. More should, and I hope will, follow. I want to see as much pressure as possible to awaken these sleeping Mobile networks to the brave new world of affordable and ubiquitous mobile data.

In their own little way MacDonalds may just be the required catalyst. If it wakes people up to using data unplugged then it can only be good in the medium to long term.

I may be being overly optimistic - but the gates to mobile data have to be broken down one day soon. If not by the incumbent operators then by the new WiMAX alliances that will undoubtedly form.