This one really slipped by my radar. I knew that a lot of McD’s had BT Openzone Hot spots, but not being interested in spending £6 per hour for Internet access I had not really considered that McDonalds would be positioning themselves ahead of the game in the “WiFi while you eat” market place. It appears I was wrong and in many outlets The Cloud now offers free WiFi to customers, all that is required to get access is that you fill out a form with name, post code and email address ( presumably for customer stats ) and you are away.

From what I can gather this is part of a push to try to move McDonalds into a new market in direct competition with the likes of StarBucks and Costa Coffee, with many restaurants being re-fitted with new trendier decor as well.

Have you tried the McDonalds WiFi ? Does it make you more inclined to drop into a McDonalds ? Let me know what you think.

For some time now I have been running a FON Router for both personal and public access ( although it is fair to say the public side is very limited ! ). A few weeks ago I was sent an email from FON inviting me to apply to be part of their Beta programme. I returned the email promptly and this week I received a response informing me that I had been accepted to the programme and that in future I would be receiving their beta products for evaluation free of charge. All that is required in return is that I write an evaluation and return it to them. Sounds like a good deal to me.

Having only last week ordered the Fontenna ( the FON Router external antenna ) I am hoping that the first product I get to evaluate might be FON’s forthcoming 802.11n router. If this video is correct the claimed range for this device is around 1Km. If you think about the density of FON routers necessary to achieve blanket coverage of a particular area this sort of range makes the reality of a widely available free wireless infrastructure really start to be an possibility.

PS. Would love to hear from you if you are a Telford based FON user, I know from the FON Maps there are a few out there, one within half a mile of myself which would be an interesting test of the new 802.11n routers….

[tags]fon, wireless network, wlan, 802.11n, community network[/tags]