Alternative Title: How to use Restaurant Wi-Fi but with Take-Out
So I was browsing Amazon for some directional radio antennas that I could use for cellular when I came across the TP-Link CPE210 2.4GHz N300. These things have a router, Wi-Fi radio, and directional antenna all in one unit. Digging deeper and researching these units to discover that they are used for point-to-point transmission of wireless internet in rural areas that are served by WISPs. These can be directly connected to an ISP’s main broadcast or repeated off one another, house to house, sort of creating a wireless network of access points relying on each other back to the source.
These things are pretty cool and serve a good use case but I had something else in mind.
I have an awesome uncle that has a vacation house near a lake and invites our family to come a few times during the summer. In late 2019, a Mcdonald’s was being built across the lake and when I came back early summer of 2020, it was done. Sitting near the lake my phone notified me that there was an open Wi-Fi network nearby that it could connect to. To my astonishment, my phone saw the McDonalds free Wi-Fi that they offer at pretty much every location. I tried connecting to it but my phone was unable to probably due to it being too far. According to Google Maps, the establishment is about 1,700 ft away.
So back to the CPE210, I had the idea to set this up and see if I could connect to the McDonald Wi-Fi at my uncle’s house. I had a pretty good feeling that it would work due to the use case of the unit, the little to no obstructions across the lake, and the fact that my phone could see the network. So I ordered one, and it worked great!
The router’s configuration page at 192.168.1.254 was very simple and straightforward to configure. It comes with several options to configure the unit as but I set it up with a DHCP server so that my devices could see each other on its network but McDonald’s could only see one device (the Wi-Fi radio).
At this particular location, McDonald’s uses WOW! (Wide Open West) as their ISP (even though the captive portal has AT&T branding). I searched for their internet speed test tool so I could test on their servers the download and upload speeds and I was fairly impressed.
In this particular result, I saw a download of 30.1 Mbps and 10.7 Mbps upload. Running the test several times I have seen download speeds high as 50 Mbps and upload speeds around 18 Mbps. This connection would be more than suitable for everyday web browsing, streaming movies and TV shows, and even gaming (ping was 16 ms). The connection was pretty stable and the CPE210 reported “Great” in the signal quality area on the configuration page.
“So, are there any downsides? Well, one I can think of is the captive portal that is required for you to click on “Get Connected” which has you agree to McDonald’s terms of service (which I’m pretty sure this violates). I believe this expires after a few hours which requires you to click on “Get Connected” again. This could be problematic for long-term file downloads or video conferencing which would be annoying to do. This is something I plan to look into and try automating to limit as little downtime as possible.
Thanks for reading!