Wifi at McDonalds is a really stupid idea. What McDonalds needs to do is stick to the business model that made their fortune- FAST FOOD. They are no Starbucks. Who wants to hang out at McDonalds and surf the net on free wifi with screaming kids and yelling moms all around you?
Wifi centers are best done at large population centers, like airports ( Thank you Apple!) and future at sports stadiums, hotels, and, sit down restaurants, but Fast food places? It will be a way to convert fast food to slow expensive food.
edit- this is typed as I re-listened to the podcast. Bob you have it right! It was Ralph de la Vega and he made the announcement in a UBS conference podcast to stock holders recently. Dec 9
He discussed the upgrade process to LTE and was placing his bets on being able to do LTE faster than any other carrier. LTE is being implemented by first upgrading the backhaul equpment and upgrading to HSPA 7.2, then when the phones are out for LTE, they will be in position to move rapidly as the LTE equipment will use existing towers as today.
Specifically, he said about NY and SF- that when ATT turned on 850 Mhz the bandwidth increased 30% and over taxed the back haul equipment. He said NY has top priority to fix and SF same deal but at a slower pace.
3% of their iphone users are consuming 40% of the data traffic. He said he was not going to give any details at this time but will do what they can to reduce the the usage by those 3%. "They will be aggressive in that endeavor." He said that "his approach will likely be some sort of pricing plan to reduce bandwidth but the competition also needs to be looked at before they go this route. "
He also said that he improved the margins in the division from 33% to 38% by avoiding costly expansion while at the same time increasing the number of customers. The only area of significant expansion was in the back haul expansion in those troubled areas. NO plans for further expansion at this time and will continue to hold expansion costs as they did in the prior year.
He said that 40% of ATT's customer base are subscribed to some data plan. He refused to elaborate further.
I thought that was GREAT!
