Starbucks offering free and paid WiFi with AT&T

Starbucks is ending a 6 year deal with T-Mobile where there was no free WiFi and the paid WiFi cost more than with AT&T. My only question is how much did Apple have to do with this move?

Apparently the changes will start taking effect this spring, and I am sure that AT&T and/or Starbucks will shortly announce a new deal with Apple to offer free WiFi in Starbucks. Here is the nice part though, if you have a Starbucks purchase card, you get 2 free hours of WiFi a day, then after that, its $3.99 every two hours, not a bad price at all.

Even better though is that you have the option to buy a monthly subscription which is $19.99 a month, and doesn’t just get you unlimited access at all the Starbucks locations, but unlimited access at all 70,000 AT&T hotspots. How much better than the T-Mobile deal is that? So much better, they were charging $6 per hour or $9.99 for a day pass, and $39.99 per month.

By the end of the year Starbucks plans to have the new AT&T service available in 7,000 of its stores. Starbucks says that the move wasn’t due to QoS issues; it was just simply that AT&T had more to offer in the long and the short of it.

[via Yahoo News]