One of the things I love about the university I work at is that WiFi is ubiquitous. I have yet to find a place on campus where I can’t get a decent network connection. And the feature is certainly popular — walk through the student union or even take a stroll outside across the campus and you’ll see dozens of people with their laptops connecting to the Internet.
But go just a mile or so off-campus and there’s zilch. At least two or three times a week I’m eating lunch at a restaurant where I’m thinking “you know, if these folks had a WiFi connection, this would be a great place to come more often.”
Which is why McDonald’s announcement of its WiFi trial is so interesting. Frankly, I think McDonald’s has the right idea and I’m surprised that more restaurants aren’t exploring this. The beauty of McDonald’s plan is that as long as you’re a paying customer, the WiFi access is free.
That’s the only way I can imagine I’d ever pay for WiFi access. Other than McDonald’s, the main nationwide efforts to add WiFi seem to be installing networks at, say, all Starbucks and then making the customer pay an additional charge on top of whatever he’s paying for food, coffee, etc. for network access. I guess if you spend a lot of time at a specific place like Starbucks that might make sense or aren’t very price conscious that might not make sense, but if such experiments are going to succeed they’re going to have to give away the network access to paying customers and advertise the feature as a competitive advantage.
I don’t understand why more places aren’t experimenting with that model. Offering a basic level of access wouldn’t be very expensive nor does it seem it would be all that difficult to maintain from a technical standpoint.
I hope McDonald’s experiment inspires others because, frankly, though my daughter loves McDonald’s the seating accomdations leave my body feeling like it spent 20 minutes in a wrestling cage match with The Rock.