Need Fast Wi-Fi With Those Fries? Ookla Benchmarks Top Fast Food Chains
According to Ookla, out of all Speedtest samples taken from what it calls "quick service restaurants", 37.3% were at Starbucks and 32.3% were at McDonald's, but Starbucks actually rates closer to the bottom in terms of Wi-Fi service quality. This isn't really down to bad tech, according to Ookla, but rather policies that seem to put a very low ceiling on guest Wi-Fi performance.
McDonald's actually fares rather well. It meets Ookla's threshold of 25 Mbps downloads and 3 MBps uploads 81.5% of the time, and its median speeds are 106.39 Mbps download and 27.51 Mbps upload, which is faster than this writer's home internet (at least for uploads.) Only Panera Bread offered a higher median download speed, at 116.49 Mbps, while median uploads were about the same.
Chick-Fil-A offers the best median uploads apparently, with a transfer rate of 37.92 Mbps, but downloads appear to be strictly capped, as the chain seemingly offers only a 38.98 Mbps median download speed. Meanwhile, Starbucks, Taco Bell, and Domino's all offer median connection speeds that don't even rate as broadband, with Taco Bell being the most consistently awful.
Curiously, despite that Wi-Fi 7 is basically not represented among the McDonald's and Starbucks data, the latest and greatest Wi-Fi standard is apparently present in 7.2% of fast food places covered by Ookla's Speedtest data. There are some other interesting data points in the blog post, including which ISPs are serving which restaurants, and more detailed data for you to peruse, so head over to the Ookla blog for the full story.
