McDonalds' WiFi Stumbles

[Brad Isaac]

We've talked about McDonalds being one of the restaurant chains who have or will have installed WiFi access for many of their locations. Many of our arguments were that it wouldn't work because McDonalds doesn't attract the "wifi crowd."
According to an eWeek article McDonalds has attracted some of the WiFi crowd, but they are unable to use the service in at least 1 Manhattan, NY location.
"There's barely enough elbow room to wrap your hands around a Quarter Pounder, let alone table space to spread out with a laptop.
Which is probably why almost no one in the lunch crowd on this early June day was flipping open a laptop to get online or read e-mail—which would have been a futile endeavor in any case, since the access point was fried. The directions on a card given to customers hoping to sample the service yielded nothing. While the network seemed to be active, the access point wasn't issuing the Internet Protocol addresses needed to access the Web.
A Baseline call to the support line of Cometa Networks, the network provider, confirmed the access point was not working. A Cometa representative said he would pass the report to a service rep and asked for a callback number.
McDonald's technology trials over the past few years seem much like the McDLT and the McLean—mere flashes on the grill. For years, the company has made a variety of technology investments with mixed results."

[jkendrick]

Cometa announced yesterday they were closing their doors and shutting down their national hot-spot network. I'll bet it's already started.