T-Mobile puts Wi-Fi in your tank in the UK: Although Estonia beat the rest of the world on combining filling stations and Wi-Fi, the idea is finally turning into reality in other countries. T-Mobile says in this article that they'll equip 100s of petrol stations in the UK with Wi-Fi hot spots. They have 56 hot spots in the UK already. For a certain kind of business user, this is ideal, and it's part of what I think is the McDonald's model: pull up, transmit and receive for 10 to 15 minutes, and drive off.
This activity was dubbed 'data fueling' by a marketing rep from Symbol Technologies at the Shorecliff Hotspot Conference in San Jose, September last year. It's happening mostly at truck stops in the US, though sporadically. Gas station/convenience stores can be covered with a single AP as would suffice at a typical coffee shop, but useful coverage at a 'real' truck stop needs an AP in the restaurant portion as well as coverage out in the much larger areas that the rigs park in. The metal trailers cause multipath bounces, so the parking areas need to have their AP mounted high enough to give good coverage to the drivers in the rigs while they're fueling the units and during bad weather when the truck's occupants don't want to walk into the facility building. A large truck stop is like providing coverage to airplanes as they taxi up and push back from the concourse gate. It's about servicing the rigs as they're in these enormous parking lots, not so much inside the eating areas.