The fast food chain McDonald's is to introduce free high speed wireless internet access at most of its 1,200 restaurants by the end of the year in a move which will make it the UK's biggest provider of such a service.
Customers will be able to go online via their laptops, compatible mobile phones and games consoles for hours on end if they wish. The initiative goes a step further than existing services offered by some coffee shops and cafes, which provide Wi-Fi hotspots but charge users a fee.
McDonald's said its service would benefit a wide range of customers, from business people making a "pit stop" to check email between meetings to those looking for a leisurely break at the weekend to download music. It claimed a hotspot user who pays to log on for just an hour a week in a coffee shop could stand to save as much as £260 a year on premium Wi-Fi charges by using McDonald's free service. It has already introduced the free scheme in 8,000 of its 13,000 outlets in the US.
The company's president and chief executive officer, Steve Easterbrook, said: "We hope that this will be a breath of fresh air and give greater choice for Wi-Fi hotspot users who have had little choice but to pay by the month or hour to access the internet on the move." Faced with the prospect of young people spending hours surfing the net after buying just a single cup of coffee, a spokesman for McDonald's said: "We would be comfortable with that. There will be no restrictions."
The editor of Computing, Bryan Glick, said: "The future of technology is in secure, wireless, mobile, go-anywhere computers and anything that helps people achieve that is a step in the right direction."
