Make that a Big Meeting with fries Monday, October 08, 2007

Wow - say Goodbye Starbucks and Hello MacDonalds.

Well not quite, but McDonalds is going to put free wifi in most of its 1,200 UK outlets by the end of the year, making it the biggest UK wifi provider according to the Guardian

Could this mean that "hoodies" get pushed out from loitering in the restaurants by geeks & suits weilding laptops. (or will this be a more convenient location for muggings).

I'm not sure they know what they are letting themselves in for:

Faced with the prospect of young people spending hours surfing the net after buying just a single cup of coffee, a spokesman for McDonald's said: "We would be comfortable with that. There will be no restrictions."

I do hope they will be installing more power outlets for customers!

Funnily enough, on the way home from Future of Web Apps last week, I popped in for a pint at the Fox. It didn't have wifi, which prompted my colleague and I to chat about how easy it would have been for the owners to put free wifi in there, the cost of which we believed would be quickly recouped from incremental sales from conference attendees. Why more places don't do it beats me - gets my custom over non-wifi establishments every time.

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posted by John Wilson @ 5:34 PM Permanent Link ,

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London gets free wifi Monday, July 16, 2007

Coming shortly after The Cloud launched their wifi network in the City of London, London is getting another wifi network, but this one is to be ad-funded rather than subscription.

Being offered by free-hotspot.com and MeshHopper who've partnered to create online-4-free, the service will offer free Wi-Fi access along the Thames River for 22 kilometres from Millbank to Greenwich. This new service will not only provide free Wi-Fi Internet access in hotels, restaurants, cafes and offices along the riverside, but also to people in boats on the Thames.

The free Wi-Fi service will be supported by sponsors, and users will be asked to watch a 15-30 second advert in order to obtain 15 minutes of free wireless Internet service; more adverts will be delivered each 15 minutes. Those who may want to bypass those ads need to sign up for the service provided by MeshHopper.

The free service offers download speeds of about 256kbps, while the pay service offers download speeds of 500 kbps -- equivalent to the speed of modern cellular data connections.

Free-hotspots operates about 1,500 small networks in locations across Europe.

Coverage info can be found here and below is a map showing reported coverage area.

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The Cloud - Wifi in the City Thursday, April 26, 2007

The Cloud launched their much heralded wifi network that supposedly covers the City of London (as distinct from Greater London inc West End etc). There is a free month's trial, which I signed up for.

As I spend much time travelling round the City to meetings, I'm an ideal prospect for the service, but I'm not sure that there are many others in a similar situation.

Well my experiences with it have been very poor in the first couple of days, manifesting itself as low strength signal and slow connectivity, assuming I could even connect in the first place. This post was going to have been sent from a coffee shop near Aldgate whilst I was waiting to go to a meeting opposite but the Cloud's was proving unreliable. Thankfully someone had left their wireless network unsecured in a nearby building so I was able to hitch-hike on it to post this.

I will persevere during the trial but right now I am not a buyer. Meantime, I was also alerted to ipass.com which reportedly provides a global aggregator service to connect you to wifi networks worldwide via a single account, just like a roaming agreement but for a single monthly price. Sadly their website is very unfriendly and I can't see where you can see the pricing or where to sign up!

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