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Nintendo & McDonalds Providing WiFi
redemtionboy writes "According to IGN, "Nintendo of America on Tuesday will announce a groundbreaking partnership with Wi-Fi provider Wayport to make available free Internet access to DS owners at McDonald's restaurants across the nation." " There are so many potential jokes here that I'm gonna just leave it to you guys to make your own.
Hmm, I would guess that you're jealous it's not in Taco Bell restaurants. Though frankly I don't see what's so funny about this. It's a step in the right direction. McD's restaurants cover about 10% of the earth. That's a lot of wireless.
When I lived in DC years ago, all of our McDonalds had these little kiosks in them when the Nintendo 64 came out. There were 4 small TV's built into the thing with 4 consoles with 2 controllers each and you could try out the system there. I don't know if that was a national partnership with all McDonalds but they were in all of the ones I went in. The consoles were in there for quite a while (about 6 months if I recall correctly) and then were suddenly gone. Anyway, these two companies at least have some history of working together in the past so I'm sure that made it a little easier to get something like this set up.
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It's quite simple to make money out of this: In Spains tourist lots, the restroom is looked by a numer key lock. The access code is changing on a regular basis (e.g., hourly). If you want to use the restroom, you have to buy something, because the code is automatically printed on the receipt.
:-)
They will do the same for the wireless access. They print the current access code (user & pass) on the receipt and reset the system every 30 mins. Btw. if you think, you just buy something small, that's exactly where McD has huge margins. So a Coke or ice cream every 30 mins for surfing generates enough money for maintaining the WiFi net.
However, it will be fun to see all gamers run for an ice cream at the same time every 30 mins
The article doesn't mention anything about being able to, use the web or other internet services using your DS, only to play games using Nintendo's proprietary internet gaming servers. So, while I don't know if they will, McDonalds certainly could implement an extremely restrictive firewall that only allowed communication through ports 8483 and 10554 (for example), and also restricted outgoing traffic to a handful of DS gaming servers.
of course, if they've got the technical capacity to provide free wifi for all devices, it certainly seems like a worthwhile "value-added" service to offer, so who knows?