1FPS|by David Chartier

So AT&T has begun its takeover of T-Mobile’s Starbucks hotspots. A friend in Texas saw that AT&T has already moved into one of his local Starbucks, so he did some poking around.

Now under AT&T’s reign, users can get two free hours of WiFi every day. However, the company also designed a portal to make it easy for iPhone users to log in (blurry screenshot above), complete with the ability to purchase memberships or day passes, and even use a coupon or prepaid card, right on the handset.

This is a great idea for coffee drinkers who want to sign up but don’t own notebooks, and those who simply want to roll with an iPhone.

I spoke with a manager in one of my local Starbucks today and asked about how long the AT&T switchover is going to take. She wasn’t positive, but she believes she heard that the plan is to have all ~7,000 stores finished by summer.

Macworld says AT&T has begun taking over Starbucks WiFi hotspots from T-Mobile. Straight out the gate, AT&T is already doing a bunch of interesting things with the service:

For those who aren’t in AT&T’s thrall already, you can get up to two hours of consecutive free access every day by putting value on a Starbucks stored-value card, and either using it or adding funds to its balance at least every 30 days.

Smart way to add another benefit to those recently refreshed Starbucks Cards.

I’ve been a T-Mobile Hotspot customer for years as I’ve always needed a place to do work and school stuff away from home, and I’ve always thought T-Mobile’s overall handling of the service was pretty pathetic. Never any real promotions, and never a change from the ridiculous prices of $30/month with a one-year contract, $20/month if you’re a T-Mobile wireless customer or Starbucks employee, or a whopping $40 month-to-month.

If you need more than two daily hours, service is $20 a month (I believe without a contract) for non-AT&T broadband customers, or free if you have at least 1.5MB DSL/broadband service as a home customer.

Great move all around. Two hours is a generous offering for the casual user, and $20/month is definitely reasonable for people like me who spend a little more time than the normal customer actually sitting down in a Starbucks to do work.

I, for one, welcome our new Starbucks AT&T hotspot overlords.

Hooray! Not only does the monthly subscription get cheaper (though it should simply be free), AT&T will offer two hours of free WiFi each day to users before they need to pay $3.99 for additional chunks of time, or of course ante up for a full subscription. AT&T broadband customers also get a free subscription to the 7,000+ hotspots already in place.

Brilliant, brilliant move. T-Mobile couldn’t have sucked any worse at coffee shop wifi, unless they hired someone to kick customers in the pants when they walked in the door. T-Mobile’s subscription plans were $40/month on a monthly basis (no, not a typo), $30/month if you sign a frigging one-year contract, and $20/month if you’re a T-Mobile phone customer, or a Starbucks (and probably T-Mobile) employee.

Those prices remained the same for years, probably since the service debuted. While completely free WiFi would arguably bring in more coffee-slugging customers, AT&T’s ideas are a welcome change to a painfully stagnating service. Starbucks says the market-by-market rollout begins in Spring 2008.

Us too! In fact… we’ve been doing touch screens for a *while* now! Really! Never mind that we didn’t actually innovate anything in the decade or so that we’ve been doing touch screens, mind you… but we have ‘em!

I’m at a Starbucks, using their overpriced T-Mobile Hotspot service to get some work done, and I found a digg article I wanted to, uh, digg. Unfortunately, it seems like digg has to ban certain IPs, and T-Mobile’s Hotspots must’ve made their list. I would imagine this is being done because people are gaming their system from public spots in some way, but it’s kinda funny: you would think they would use the free hotspots for this kind of stuff. Unless, of course, they’ve already ruined all of those in their area.
[tags]digg, T-Mobile, hotspot[/tags]