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.

A Joke

[James Kilton]

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.

Nintendo and McDonalds partnered before

[ChrisF79]

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.

Re:This won't last

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a way to try and keep a younger generation eating there. Because of all this hype about eating healthy, they have lost a lot of their more youthful market-base. If you have seen Super-size Me, McDonald's tries really hard to get kids to eat there, because then they (and their families) eat there for life.

Re:wait wait wait

[frank378]

Agreed, they've started selling salads and healthier offerings (what isn't healthier than a mound of fried greasy stuff) but I have to think it's going to be a tough sell to their regular customer base. The people that already go to McGrease go there for...the grease. People that don't subscribe to the fast food diet wouldn't be caught dead in this place.

Anyway, to the topic at hand, video games for the kids is just an attempt at winning hearts and minds to get another generation addicted to McGrease and we all know it.

Restricting access (similar to Spanish restrooms)

[knopf]

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 :-)

Cleaning?

[BenjyD]

Can you imagine what a DS is going to look like after 30 minutes playing in the hands of a kid eating a Big Mac, fries and ketchup? Maybe McDonalds is planning to make a profit on with a DS cleaning service?

Personally, I wish McDs would just go out of business so I wouldn't have to put up with that horrendous smell of grease permeating every shopping centre.

Re:802.11x compatible?

[xappax]

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?

Re:802.11x compatible?

[macshome]

IIRC, the TCP stack will be carried by the game. So while the DS OS might not have TCP/IP, the games can.

Re:If...

[BronxBomber]

I moved from South Florida a couple of months ago, and most of the local McD's all offered free WiFi already.

You'd get a free hour to go along with your fries... although I never used it, so I am not sure what was involved in getting access to their network, or how time was regulated.

So the McD's WiFi part isnt really new. I dont know what would have prevented any DS users then from using their service.

It makes sense

[gameboyhippo]

At the McDonalds here in my town, we have a couple gamecubes hooked up. It would make sense that they would continue to partner with Nintendo. I can see a lot more McDonalds crowded. I've seen some comments that claim that this will allow people to download their kiddy porn and crap like that at Micky D's. I don't think this will be the case. I think the DS will have a standard port to play games on. So all they have to enable is that one port.

Re:The End

[Donniedarkness]

The current generation of American children will get to harpoonable size by the end of the decade.

You've never been to the south, have you? my father's entire family was harpoonable size (with the exception of myself). They're big enough, now. I blame it on home-cooked fried foods more than fast-food joints.

Re:If...

[bram]

MAC's are spoofable.

They can always shape the traffic they see, that's about it.
When they see ssh sessions passing they can block them if they use something like Packeteer [packeteer.com], layer 7 filter [sf.net] or other traffic shaping solutions.

Fuck, my 3rd post in the last year(s), my average is going up again ;)

Wayport WiFi != internet connectivity

[dazedNconfuzed]

You probably won't be able to connect your laptop to it.

Now it's making sense.

The Burger King I frequent (so long as they have $1 Whoppers) does have unsecured Wayport WiFi ... but try as I might, I can't get an Internet connection thru it. Never crossed my mind that it would be only for Nintendo use.

Re:This won't last

[flamingdog]

I agree completely, but I've noticed some strange things lately about McDonalds. There have been about 3 or 4 recently built around me that I've been to, and there are some noticeable differences in modern McDonalds. They all have comfortable atmospheres. They have a giant LCD TV. They don't have the standard fast-food "eat and get the hell out as quickly as possible" kind of atmosphere inside. They also have a lot more seats than you'd think they'll ever need. Maybe this is just around me (say, for example, that it's just the same owner in this area doing these things or something), but I think they may be trying to get customers to stay IN the "restaurant" instead of ordering and getting the hell out. Having an obnoxious amount of seats, and really nice, huge LCD TV's would seem to back this up.

(For those of you who think this is senseless drivel, try to recall Long John Silver's before 1995. Great family restaurant that was relaxed and encouraged you to sit around inside and eat and be merry. Whenever I'd eat at one, it was packed to the brim. Around 1995 they changed to the standard fast food get in/out, and now whenever I stop at one, there are 5 people inside at most.)