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Feb

11

Starbucks, AT&T join to offer free and/or cheaper WiFi


This sounds to me like what Caribou Coffee does:

Starbucks announced today it will give most any customer two consecutive hours a day of free Wi-Fi access. Specifically, that offer applies to anyone who uses its prepaid Starbucks Card at least once a month. That represents as many as 60 hours of access for the price of one $2 cup of coffee.

The offer comes as Starbucks switches the company providing it with wireless service to AT&T from T-Mobile. Most of AT&T’s broadband data customers will also have unlmited free access to Wi-Fi at 7,000 Starbucks. They have already been able to use AT&T’s other 10,000 hotspots free.

Even for paying customers, the price of using the service has gone down. AT&T will provide two hours of wireless access at Starbucks for $3.99, and an unlimited access plan from AT&T is $20 a month. T-Mobile had charged $6 per hour, $10 per day, or $40 per month. (Anyone who has other reasons to want to keep a T-Mobile account will be able to continue using Starbucks through a new roaming arrangement with AT&T.)

Here’s Starbucks’s announcement.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 5:01 pm February 11th, 2008 in Blogging, Business, Tech 

Comments

2 Responses to “Starbucks, AT&T join to offer free and/or cheaper WiFi”

  1. 1 James on February 12th, 2008 8:54 pm

    Gee, here is a novel idea… offer a FREE wifi hotspot. Panera Bread does it, many airports do it, Office Depot does it, heck, the mom and pop Gyro place in town does it. Why does Starbuck$ feel like they need to get with a provider that wants to charge people? And I am an AT&T customer at home, but how will my Verizon VX6700 smartphone be able to prove that to the StarBucks Bridge Troll?

  2. 2 Jill Miller Zimon on February 12th, 2008 10:41 pm

    I can’t answer that last question, I’m afraid but I also think the charging thing? It’s a little like how really expensive hotels make you pay for Internet access while the cheapies have it free everywhere?

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