Starbucks will partner with AT&T for the initiative, ditching its six-year alliance with T-Mobile. After two hours, customers will be able to access the Web for $3.99 for an additional two hours. Customers can purchase monthly access plans for $19.99, and people with AT&T broadband at home will be able to connect at Starbucks for no additional charge. The deal is slated to take effect later this year.
Starbucks previously offered Wi-Fi through a significantly pricier deal with T-Mobile. That arrangement let customers connect for $6 an hour, $9.99 a day or $39.99 a month.
While free Wi-Fi is increasingly ubiquitous in venues like public parks and coffee shops, the movement to blanket entire cities with it seems to have stalled. Last week, EarthLink said it was getting out of the municipal Wi-Fi business. That decision came several months after the company bailed on a well-publicized plan to provide San Francisco with free Wi-Fi in partnership with Google.
Perhaps instead of one free Wi-Fi provider per city, we'll be left with a hodgepodge of various providers at different locations. That arrangement should work as long as the service is free, but it's not likely that each provider will be able to also charge monthly access fees as AT&T is proposing at Starbucks. While consumers might be willing to pay by the hour to connect, not too many people are going to be willing to pay for monthly Wi-Fi subscriptions with more than one company.