You'll remember I wrote a few weeks ago about McDonalds plan to roll out free Wi-Fi in all their UK restaurants? Well, they seem to have done it already. Below is my illustrated report on how this works out in practice. Summary: it lives! - but perhaps not that convenient for lightning quick access...

A cluster of cardboard popups greeted me today on a 'fact finding' trip into fast food territory. Hey, they've gone and done it already!

Getting connected seemed simple enough at first glance, I picked 'The Cloud' from the Easy WLAN option in Web and.. errr... nothing. I tried again. Nothing. I tried one more time and.... success. There's a standard 'The Cloud' login screen for those who have already paid for countrywide access, plus a big swirling McDonalds logo:

 

Clicking on the logo brings up a guest screen with a 'Name/Email address/Postcode' form, so that McDonalds and The Cloud can gather data on who's actually using the service. Fair enough, although I bet they get a very high proportion of people just typing in rubbish into the form in order to progress without giving away any private details or risking being added to an email spam list.

Once past the survey form, there's confirmation of a valid web session that'll work for up to four hours - pretty generous:

Clicking on the link to a new window gets you started browsing for real and speeds didn't seem too bad for a free hotspot. The home page is forced to The Cloud's own home, which is also fair enough, after which you can browse away to your heart's content for free.

So a qualified success then, although the reliance on people filling in a form may be a hiccup for people using smartphones without qwerty keyboards - it'll certainly mean plenty of junk input/data - if I were McDonalds I'd forget the form altogether as it only slows people down.

When you're eating in McDonalds in the first place, you're either in a tearing hurry or have family with you and in neither case have you got time to do much in the way of form entry!

Still kudos to McDonalds for doing the Wi-Fi deal and, if you're faced with the usual fast food options when out with your kids, at least this one means that you've got a free way to sneakily check up on the latest stories and comments on AllAboutSymbian!

Steve Litchfield, 24th October 2007