Traveling Man wrote:
> On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:14:45 +0000, Larry wrote:
>
>> 4phun <vic.healey@gmail.com> wrote in news:eb878ca6-09a3-431a-bd69-
>> df89889b2dc5@e25g2000prg.googlegroups.com:
>>
>>> Pay-as-you-go service is $3.95 for two hours, down from $6.00 per hour
>>> or $10.00 per day with T-Mobile.
>>>
>>>
>> See? I told ya. SELLphones....nickel and dime you to death....
>>
>> Right across the parking lot from Starbucky's is Atlanta Bread and Panera
>> Bread cafes, here. Free internet for ALL at both places. It didn't SELL
>> before....it won't SELL, now.
>>
>> Stop by the front desk of Embassy Suites and ask the pretty girl for a wifi
>> passcard. Instead of logging on for a free day, it'll work all month.
>
> I agree. I use Panera frequently when traveling. I even have Panera POIs
> in my Garmin GPS so I can easily locate the nearest one.

Most of the coffee houses in my area have free WiFi, as well as better
coffee than Starbucks. Of course the whole city has free WiFi as well,
though it's only 1Mb/s.

Last year when I was back in Florida, in my college town, even Starbucks
had free WiFi.

Their new program of 2 hours of free WiFi with a prepaid card is
probably going to work a lot better than the old system.

They needed a way of providing WiFi at no cost to customers that buy
something, without having the customer camp out all day after buying one
cup of whatever. At independent coffee houses I've seen people that
appear to be their for the long haul, taking up a four person table with
their computer equipment, running extension cords across the floor,
etc.. These places have turned into free office space, with people
meeting clients there for business meetings, etc.

For the person that is in a strange city, and that hasn't researched
where to get free WiFi in advance, the Starbucks program is pretty good.
According to most of the stories, no purchase is necessary to get the
two free hours. Of course you could have multiple Starbucks cards to
extend the amount of time, unless they look at your MAC address (in
which case you could use a USB, CardBus, or ExpressCard WiFi adapter.