Wyandotte County races on (or at least tries to).

I just happened to see a report on another local blog that the newly opened McDonald's restaurant in the Legends shopping center development at Village West next to the Kansas Speedway has free wireless Internet, so I saved a day's lunch money to finance the gas for a drive out there and back for a Saturday breakfast. Sadly, I only ended up batting .500. I got the meal, but not the Internet.

Oh, the network is there, all right, and connecting to it was a snap. The problem was that it didn't give me a DNS server, so I couldn't go anywhere. The manager, an affable chap, offered what help he could ("Well, it was working earlier this week. I guess I'll have to call it in.").

While I sympathize with the manager-after all, he is a restaurant manager, not a system administrator-I was really disappointed at not getting a chance to sing the praises of yet another McDonald's doing more for its customers than for corporate conformity. Not only that, but in Wyandotte County-perhaps the most underserved part of the metro. I certainly hope this effort generates some momentum that results not only in more free open hotspots nearby, but carries towards the east and really starts shrinking the digital divide. For one thing, maybe the KCK Public Library will unwire its West Wyandotte branch. The building already has carrels wired for power; why not go the next step and let patrons who tote in their own laptops and thus help save scarce library workstations for those who really need them have the same access to the Internet and library resources?

And if I can have the manager's attention for a moment: I don't mean this as criticism, but advice. I realize, as I pointed out in the previous paragraph, that your expertise is in food service management and not information technology. However, I hope you realize that the strategic goals that prompted you to offer free Wi-Fi dictate that whatever you have to do to keep outages like this from becoming commonplace, you need to do-and FAST. Running a free hotspot really can and will do everything you think it can for you. There's only one way that will happen, though. You simply cannot afford to let your network get a reputation for being unreliable. Not many people are going to make a second trip to a hotspot they find has gone cold-and none will make a third.

Since I don't plan on skipping another lunch anytime soon, I won't be doing a full evaluation of this one. Any of you who make it by there once it comes back up are welcome to fill us in on what you find. The restaurant, by the way, is on the southeast corner of 106th and Parallel, right behind the Legends 14 theater. The access point is 802.11g and the SSID is KCSpeedway_McDonald's. Also, the report I read mentioned an SSID from another nearby restaurant, and cautioned against connecting to it by mistake. There is a weak signal that my finder couldn't pick up but my laptop's built-in card could which may be what the author is referring to, but the only other unencrypted networks I saw were for Wayport and Freedomlink locations, both of which are, of course, play-for-pay and rather difficult to log onto by mistake, unless you're a hopeless spendthrift.

Then again, if you're a hopeless spendthrift, you're probably too busy shopping to be sitting there reading this.