Memo to whomever is running McDonald's these days

Dear Sir, Madam, or Whatever the Case May Be:

Stopped in at one of your midtown Kansas City locations for breakfast this morning and was gratified to see that the doors were actually unlocked at 6 a. m. Sometimes they aren't at this particular restaurant for some reason. Anyway, upon entering to order my Big Breakfast, I noticed your huge wall poster hawking "Wi-Fi @ McDonald's." What I'm writing to suggest is that you left off one big adjective that I think you really ought to consider adding-"FREE!"

Now why would I be inclined to stop in again for dinner after work and stay a while to use your play-for-pay hotspot when I could just hit the drive-through, then go home and hook up with the connection I'm already paying for? In fact, why wouldn't I just go home and cook dinner under those circumstances? Getting my drift here? "Amenities" I have to pay extra for really aren't amenities when you stop and think about it. If you want me to come in rather than drive through-or drive past on my way home-you've got to offer me something I can't get otherwise. You can pick my pocket perfectly well in the drive-through lane, thank you very much. I don't need to come in and sit down for that.

Besides, I think it's only going to be a matter of time before your competitors force your hand. More and more Burger Kings are showing up in the free hotspot listings all over. This blog, in fact, reviewed a Mr. Goodcents location not long ago that's within a few blocks of your restaurant, as well as a local Dairy Queen a few months back. Why not beat them to the punch and bring all of your locations-not just those few run by forward looking 21st-century thinkers-into the free world?

And by the way, when did you start putting only one sausage patty in the Big Breakfast instead of two?

So Thursday night they're gonna party like it's 1999

This morning's Kansas City Star reports that the KCK Public Library-the last big library system in the metro that hasn't unwired-will celebrate the remodeling of its main downtown branch this coming Thursday evening.

Interesting, their plans for accommodating the coming wave of high schoolers with district-supplied laptops. They're apparently looking to shoehorn them into three "study rooms" instead of doing what simple logic dictates would be the right way to deliver services to students equipped with modern wireless-capable mobile devices. Don't inconvenience them by making them choose between your online and printed resources-instead, light up the building so they can take their computers into the stacks and then access both from there. Why spend all that money buying laptops if you're not going to leverage them to their fullest extent?

This kind of twentieth-century thinking speaks volumes about why KCK has fallen so far behind, and why the digital divide yawns wider in Wyandotte County than just about everywhere else in the metro. Did it occur to anyone with the library or school district that besides fake trees and a fish tank-among all the other things you bought with the $3.4 million you spent on this makeover-that a wireless network, at least for the school laptops if not for everyone else, might be a useful addition?

What on earth do you think is going to happen when all those laptop users show up at once? Here's a hint. It'll be the same thing that happened at UMKC after they remodeled their main library's reference department into a cramped, outmoded "information commons" along the same lines as what you're planning, in order to placate a big donor. It simply became a woeful, underutilized bottleneck that hastened the necessity of the library's subsequent unwiring.

And since you'll obviously have to provide wireless access to the high schoolers eventually, what possible reason could there be not to provide it for the public at large? By all rights, you should already be doing that now. As I said at the beginning, you are now the only large public library system in metropolitan Kansas City that doesn't offer at least some kind of access for patron-owned laptops.

It's not still 1999, you know. That's why Prince doesn't sing that song any more.

Not so bad news after all-unless you're a kid

Stopped in again at the Mid-Continent Public Library's Blue Ridge branch this evening, and despite the fact that, as I previously reported, MCPL's locations don't show up as free hotspots in JiWire's listings any more, this branch at least is still offering free coupon access. I asked a librarian why MCPL doesn't just open up the network and she didn't have an answer. Maybe if someone from central administration could come here and look at all the desktop workstations occupied-and people waiting to get onto one-do you suppose that they just might get a clue? I can see three or four out of maybe a dozen users who look old enough to responsibly handle a laptop. There are also a couple of kids who obviously aren't that old having to sit and wait.

I ask you-what's wrong with this picture that a free, open and well-publicized wireless network wouldn't help fix?

Believe it, Ripley!

North Kansas City Public Library
2251 Howell, North Kansas City

802.11g
SSID: NKC library

Good news: It's here, it's free and open (for the most part-see below), and the tables in the center of the building sit next to columns with power outlets. Not so good news: They're using Zone CD for some ridiculous reason, meaning not only that you have to click through their acceptable use policy (a document that, just as an aside, I think they really need to run by a lawyer before it gets them into trouble) and be delivered to their homepage, but that every so often, you have to click back through it and go once again to the homepage, a la the mindlessness ath64 ran into out at the Johnson County Library a while back. (There's a simple workaround; have two tabs open in your browser, using one as a dummy and the other for your real work. Navigate to your homepage or some other site on the dummy and use it to perform the initial AUP clickthrough, then proceed with your work in the other tab. When going back to the homepage would wipe out something important, bring up the dummy tab and refresh it, performing the repeat clickthrough there. That's how I managed to post this.)

As far as I can tell, the connection is unfiltered, thus explaining the AUP's warning that use is restricted to persons 18 or over. Whether they could really enforce this on an open network unless a user was clearly accessing illegal content is questionable, in my view. Why not just close the network and require library card authentication if you don't trust your patrons? That's the question that would come to my mind if I were a juror hearing a case stemming from this issue.

Anyway, it's good to see NKC finally come into this century with the rest of us. Now if a certain library system to the west would wake up and take the hint...

AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

You know, I really thought i'd never have to write another post like this, given that it's been maybe a year since the last one. And this one really gets to me because it's for a type of location I've been waiting to see unwire locally. The only other Wi-Fi laundromat I've seen listed anywhere is down in Lawrence.

So I was eager to give the Westport Laundromat at 1409 Westport Road in Kansas City a good review. Besides, I have a certain affinity for the place, having frequented it for its intended purpose back in my pre-homeowner days. But alas, it was not to be. No IP address from the access point's DHCP server. Too bad. I was thinking about bringing in a load or two on my way home from work every now and then, just for old time's sake.

Well, if any of you happen by and notice it's fixed, let everyone here know.

Good news (maybe) and bad news (for sure)

Looks like the Mid-Continent Public Library's dalliance with free and almost-open Wi-Fi has ended. None of their locations show up as free hotspots in JiWire's listings any more.

I think, however, that it's only a matter of time before MCPL joins the free world. They can't be making enough money for AT&T to justify carrying on their current arrangement much longer. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see AT&T follow Verizon's lead and get out of the play-for-pay Wi-Fi game altogether. Most of their other remaining locations nationwide are McDonald's restaurants, and I can't recall the last time I saw anyone boot up in a McDonald's that wasn't an independently-operated free hotspot. And as providers of cellular broadband as well, AT&T is essentially competing with itself anyway. How much sense does that make?

The potentially good news is that there's a rumor making the rounds that the North Kansas City Public Library has finally unwired, given that they're listed as such on wififfreespot's Missouri page. This can only be categorized as a rumor at this point, since the library's website makes no mention of it at present. We'll try to check it out sometime this week, but if anyone out there has any relevant information already, feel free to share it here.

Coming soon to a hotspot near you

Glenn Fleishman of Wi-Fi Networking News has the scoop on Apple's new Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch, as well as a couple of things I personally find even more intriguing-a Wi-Fi-only version of the iTunes Music Store, and a somewhat curious marketing arrangement with Starbucks. Bring your wiPod (or laptop with iTunes installed) into one of their stores once this is up and running and you can not only connect to their T-Mobile network for free, but you can buy whatever song they happen to be playing at the moment, or browse through the last ten they've played, as well as make a regular iTunes purchase.

It isn't clear if the free access will extend beyond iTunes, but my guess is it won't. I'm baffled as to how Starbucks has survived this long-let alone been so successful-as play-for-pay. I can't imagine anything worse they could do to alienate their obviously loyal customers than to give something away for free to Johnny-come-latelies that their more established clientele is still asked to pay for.

The best hope, of course, is that this could prod Starbucks' management to finally turn the page on the calendar, say "sayonara" to T-Mobile (or, perhaps more appropriately, "auf Wiedersehen," since they're a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom) and join the "free" world.

And it'll be interesting to see whether the wiPod, if it really takes off, will have any social effects on wireless Internet and how we use it. Since you won't need a computer to load content onto a wiPod, how will the issue of parental control be addressed? Will there be pressure on operators of open hotspots-like public libraries-to block access to iTunes, or will this fall on Apple? And since five will get you ten that the porn peddlers are already gearing up to shovel smut at those few wiPodders who'll be in the market for it, could we eventually see a push for age restrictions on the sale of this and other wireless devices, or mandates that content control mechanisms be incorporated into them?

I also see the potential for some hotspot operators, somewhere down the line, to put the kibosh on filling up your wiPod on their networks should video overtake audio as the preferred content, owing to bandwidth concerns, at least until networking technology catches up.

Then again, this thing could go the way of the Newton. Anyone else out there remember the Newton?

By the way, Fleishman is one of the most insightful writers covering wireless networking technology. Bookmark his site or pick up his RSS feed. He's well worth a daily read.