> Does anyone else find this strange? I thought McD was all > about throughput, so why are they encouraging people to > sit around for an hour at a time? Or is this a drive-thru > thing? Buy one happy meal and then sit in the car park for > an hour catching up on email.
http://www.corante.com/mooreslore/20030301.shtml#24413 McDonald's Testing 802.11, or Intel? By Dana Blankenhorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> McDonald's is putting 802.11 access into some of its New York shops, and offering an hour worth of free access with purchase of an Extra Value Meal. (Hey, Ronald -- how about an hour's worth of filtered access with a Happy Meal?) Analysts are misreading this as a McDonald's play to boost its traffic. It's not. It's an Intel play aimed at boosting 802.11, and (most important) the proposition that 802.11 should be paid for -- hourly or daily. Toshiba is helping Intel pay for similar access at hundreds of other locations, installed through Cometa Networks (the Wi-Fi joint venture Intel announced a few months ago). All this is in conjunction with this week's launch of Centrino, Intel's new laptop chip, which has 802.11 support built-in. Do you see the result? Thousands of "hot spots," festooned with brand names you know, testing a variety of business models, targeting millions of laptops to be bought in the next year (or retrofitted). McDonald's isn't trying to boost its traffic. McDonald's is engaged in a branding exercise. (Watch Ronald type.) This is really a corporate effort to take back 802.11 from the hobbyists and put it on a paying basis. Look what comes out. Location X costs Y per hour, location Z costs A per day, location B costs C per hour, and each one can calculate how much traffic they got, what the "up-take" rate was. It's market research, aimed at finding the right price point for nationwide 802.11 service. When the tests are done you have a nationwide network, and you know what (as well as how) to charge for its use. Copyright (c) 2003 Corante. All Rights Reserved. -end- Art McGee Principal Consultant Virtual Identity Communications+Media+Technology 1-510-967-9381 -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
