All McDonald’s restaurants getting free Wi-Fi across Canada


Starting today, over 1,000 McDonald’s locations around the country will be flipping more than hamburgers – the fast-food chain will be flipping the switch on free Wi-Fi access for their customers.

The network, which is being implemented by Bell, will deliver free and unlimited internet access at a very respectable “up to 11 Mbps” which should be more than enough bandwidth for surfing the web, watching YouTube and maybe even the occasional Skype call.

You don’t even have to buy a Big Mac to use the free service; just log-on using the 1-click entry point, which doesn’t require a username or password.

The company expects to have 1,400 or 90% of their Canadian locations enabled with free Wi-Fi by the end of May.

If you’re scratching your head and thinking to yourself, ‘wait a minute, I thought they already had free Wi-Fi,’ you’re right. McDonald’s first implemented free Wi-Fi in their stores back in 2003, but it was a very limited roll-out with service at only a handful of participating stores.

Now if you’re serious about free, consider this: Between free Wi-Fi at McDonald’s and free Wi-Fi at Starbucks,  you’re virtually guaranteed to be no more than 5 minutes from free web access of some kind, anywhere within a major metro area.

Okay Tim Hortons… your turn… you don’t want these other guys having all the fun, do you?

Disclosure: Sync is owned and operated by Bell Media.
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6 comments

  1. john cair

    Macdonalds gets my vote…$1.04 for a senior coffee that tastes great.

    Top Value For Money!

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  3. Theodore

    Wouldn’t hackers now descend on MacDonalds now that they know people will be opening their laptops in their stores? Will MacDonalds be responsible for laptops being hacked?

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    • Shawn L.

      It’s up to the individual to make sure their computer is secure, not necessarily the internet provider. McDonalds wouldn’t be responsible for hackers trying to access computers on it’s public wifi network, same as Starbucks, airports, libraries or any other place offering free wifi. Your computer will offer some safeguards if it knows it’s operating on a public network but if you’re worried about hackers seeing your private information make sure you’ve got a good firewall and don’t do any surfing that involves exposing that info.

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  4. Ron Hansen

    Here is another reason to boycott the other major coffee chain:

    Discount for seniors
    Free WiFi
    Free coffee refills
    Lower prices for coffee

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  5. Brian

    Except that you can’t make that skype call. Or do much else for that matter other the web browsing since it appears, from the location I tried, at least that the access is severely locked down to nothing but web-browsing, and perhaps e-mail. I din’t even bother trying e-mail since it was so locked down anyway.

    Nice try McDonalds, but in my books, you get a big fat FAIL for failing to understand that people do more with Internet than browse the web. Back to Starbucks for me (and my friends).

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