19 February 2011

McDonalds WiFi - speed

McDonald's the Global Junk Food Giant, in order to entice its customers into the store, offers "FREE WiFi".

As some people may say that "Nothing comes for free", the cost of this "FREE WiFi" can quite easily be diluted into the price of high profit grossing items, like lemonades and slurpees.

So what is the actual performance of this "FREE WiFi".

In the illustrated example a download speed of 1 kbps was obtained.

This is comparable to that of technology offered to the masses (at huge cost) in the 1980's.

Telecom Viatel was offered at a download speed of 1200 bps (or 1.2kbps) and a 75 bps upload speed. The modems that were enlisted to do such a task were in the vicinity of $400, which is approximately a couple of thousand dollars in today's money.

At various times and places there were other speeds recorded of 6 kbps up to a maximum of 50 kbps.

Ironically in the illustration, Google's advertisement calls for getting a faster web browser. Why?

McDonald's redefining the term snail mail. 1 kbps is better than 0 kbps.

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