Topic: McDonald's to serve Wi-Fi with burgers

[Clive]

Reuters
January 07, 2004, 09:40 GMT

BT Group will announce on Wednesday an alliance with McDonald's to equip the fast-food restaurant chain with high-speed wireless, or Wi-Fi, Internet access throughout the United Kingdom.

Over the past 18 months, Britain's dominant telecoms carrier has been aggressively rolling out so-called public "Wi-Fi hotspots'', where laptop-toting computer users pay to access the Internet from the likes of restaurants, pubs and train stations.

BT already has more than 1,700 Wi-Fi-enabled locations around the United Kingdom after striking agreements with a variety of UK-based conference centres, hotel and restaurant chains including Hilton Hotels and Costa Coffee.

Details on the number of the number of McDonald's locations to be added to BT's Wi-Fi network, known as BT OpenZone, will be revealed later on Wednesday.

Last May, BT pushed forward by one year its goal of delivering 4,000 Wi-Fi hotspots by summer 2004, in what would be one of Europe's largest WiFi networks.

BT also has roaming agreements with TeliaSonera in Europe and Airpass Wireless in the United States.

Restaurants and pubs have jumped on the Wi-Fi bandwagon of late, in an attempt to attract customers to surf the Web while munching on a burger or sipping a coffee.
 
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