Starbucks Teams Up With T-Mobile To Charge Coffee Drinkers For WiFi

Myself and a buddy, who I’ll refer to as dread, helped my father load up his house a couple weeks ago. The amount of work performed was enough to make an ox puke. After driving across the Florida panhandle, down to central Florida, and moving an entire house, dread and I were ready for some starbucks before hitting the road to go back home. We order our favorite caffine saturated beverages, make our way to the corner filled with big comfy chairs, break out our laptops, and bam.

I look over at dread and say, “Remote Desktop Disconnected. The client could not connect to the remote computer?!” He replied with, “Are you connected to the gateway?” Of course I was connected! So I load up firefox, type in the url for my favorite search engine, and to my surprise, I’m at a “Starbucks teamed up with T-Mobile.” The site was seeking credentials, which we obviously didn’t have. Ditsy starbucks twit1 and her partner ditsy starbucks twit2 were in the back mixing up the next batch of super saturated moca laffa frappacino, so I starting navigating the site to find out what the hell was going on.

After clicking on the “sign-up” link, I’m taken to a “plan” page with a series of packages. In our eyes, starbucks pioneered the whole “wifi hotspot” deal, so we were pissed about that fact that we now had to pay another company another monthly fee in order to use some slow ass wifi connection coming from a cell phone tower. One of our ditsy bimbos comes into view, so we grab what little bit of attention span she had. Our inquiry about the restricted access yielded a small pamphlet with close to zero information, just sales lines describing how excellent the service was.

Is this an example of net neutrality coming into play? Why was Starbucks charging us for wifi access? Was the $20 dollars we spent not enough? What about the other paying customers? I do know one thing though, and not that it matters, but Starbucks will never see another dime from me.