McDonalds Wi-Fi overcooked?

MCDONALD'S FOR WIFI access. Five quick things wrong with this picture -

1. Grease on your keyboard and case of the $2000+ Centrino
2. How can you play with the Happy Meal toy and your computer?
3. Do you really want to spend more than 5 minutes in a McD's?
4. Do you really want to spend more than 2 minutes in a McD's drive-through?
5. Too much noise, between whiny kids, short-order shouting, and that beeper for the "french" fries machine.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Egg McMuffin and the sausage biscuit, but like many ‘mericans I've stopped going in there to eat unless it's a real real emergency. OK, so the WiFi hotspots in NYC are merely an "experiment," but it's the sort of thing I'd expect Mad Mike to cook up in the middle of a good Friday night bender at the pub rather than a rational business model.

I guess I'm more in favor of stock WiFi proliferation into gas stations and truck stops, so mobile workers from traveling salesmen to truck drivers can hit the mail server as they are filling up the tank. Easier to bill as well, since access could be tacked onto a credit card or RF "speed pass" key frob. And it seems like WiFi into the hotel & conference environment is a no-brainer, since you don't have to rewire rooms and can cover a floor or so with a couple of well-positioned boxes. (Depending on how big the floors are, of course).

There's still a lot of ugly left in the WiFi world to be solved and I'm worried that we're coming to the point where, like in the dotcom boom, the industry will end up overbuilding network infrastructure rather than solving interoperability and billing issues. After all, there's at least a couple dozen different WiFi roaming plans around, lots of hot spot "islands" operated by competing companies, and the coming poker game between Boingo Networks, Cometa Networks, and T-Mobile for the bestest WiFi coverage.

Jeff Pulver of Pulver.com and Voice over IP fame is thinking that VoIP over WiFi will be a pretty attractive proposition and he's got a panel session for it on (Dare I say it?) April 1, 2003 out at his Spring VON conference. I guess I am still a little sourpuss after the dotcom bomb, but since I can't go into Best Buy or Circuit City to buy my IP phone, I can afford to be a bit skeptical. VoIP-WiFi idealists believe that WiFi will end up in cell phones and compete with (still mythical, still waiting) 3G and other future systems.

Of course, this brings up another disturbing point which we're already seeing in home connectivity - the lowest common denominator and legacy hardware. If WiFi is the lowest common denominator for connectivity at 11 Mbps, it's going to be a gawd-awful leap to move people beyond it and into higher speed technology. Right now, the vast majority of homeowners are either DSL or cable connected at around 1.5 Mbps or so. Faster speeds are technically possible, but are not business-model affordable to support upgrades to the next level. The mad rush to 802.11b will likely make broad scale deployment of -a and -g networks a non-starter. When -b systems become clogged (by users) and fogged (by interference), people are going start to bitch loudly, but there won't be any free cash for upgrades. µ