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IBM has authorized it's mobile workforce to use McDonald's WiFi network. This is mostly interesting as a small milestone in the mobile workforce/ubiquitous networking realm. It's also interesting because the whole McDonald's WiFi thing usually gets nothing but snickers from folks: it seems absurd that people would go there and use their WiFi'ed up laptops.

But, apparently, it's not so absurd.

I wonder what they use to monitor those WiFi connections: you'd almost need a special piece of hardware that simply had a WiFi card and constantly monitored the connection it was getting to the base station. If you were super paranoid, you'd hook it up to the wire connection so that, assuming the wire connection didn't go down, you could report loss of WiFi connectivity.

Really, the device could be a super-cheap (used and old) laptop with the monitoring agent installed on it that you just plug-in somewhere. Or, you could simply have specially made pieces of hardware that were just becons: if you couldn't connect to the monitoring agent, or they couldn't connect to the agent, over the WiFi network then they'd be considered down. Maybe these would low-powered enough to run off batteries instead of having to plug them in.

Once plugged in, the laptop would establish it's net connection and start reporting to a centralized place. It'd be really whizbang if all you had to do was plug the device in and all the network connectivity was automated: for most WiFi hot-spots I've encountered (without passwords or the need to configure the connection), this would probably be possible.

Link.