Is McDonald's Free WiFi Worth Bothering With?

Recently McDonald's, who had previously charged for access to their WiFi, recently decided to open their WiFi to all who desired to connect to it free of charge. At first glance, when using a laptop computer, it appears as though the WiFi offered by McDonald's seems very promising due to the strength and distance their signal travels. I was able to see the connection from the other side of the shopping plaza where the local McDonald's is located. However, upon actually connecting to the service, you will discover that you need to jump through 2 pages in order to actually use the service.

While not exactly an inconvenience, after the two pages you notice the speed is not all that it is cracked up to be. McDonald's, in all of their infinite wisdom, has the network locked down using a Secure Certificate. Which for me, an Ubuntu user using Firefox, I received numerous popups about the certificate not being valid. This leads me to believe that the certificate is not one actually distributed by a certificate agency, but a self signed certificate.

I am not sure if it is that McDonald's has super slow Internet access or their using port 443 to secure the communication between router and my laptop, but the Internet here is extremely slow. I have run both a download and upload speed test for a local McDonald's as well as a local Pizza and Chicken restaurant.

The results of running the tests at both places have concluded that McDonald's WiFi is extremely slow. The speed test for the local Chicken and Pizza place came back as 100Kbps for download and 100Kbps for upload. Not too bad for a local business offering WiFi access. These speed are extremely high when compared to the results McDonald's WiFi access received: 100Kbps for download and 100Kbps for upload.

For my laptop, which on average is able to get about 2 to 2.5 hours on a full battery charge, McDonald's access is not extremely bad, unless you are not the only one connected. Also be prepared to spend some actual time there as opening a simple Google page or FaceBook took a little while to open.