Orange County Register

Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks started this week and that has T-Mobile throwing a fit. T-Mobile had long been the exclusive Wi-Fi provider to Starbucks and a number of hotspots around the world.

AT&T took over the service in February.

T-Mobile is now suing Starbucks claiming that the coffee chain “secretly colluded with AT&T to offer free Wi-Fi Internet access in its cafes despite an exclusive agreement with T-Mobile,” according to a story by Reuters.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer story is more specific: The agreement allowed T-Mobile to offer Wi-Fi exclusively at Starbucks until AT&T took over all of the coffee chain’s stores. As of the lawsuit, filed Thursday in New York, all but two stores in the U.S. had been converted to AT&T.

Giga Omni Media points out likely reasons for AT&T to introduce the free service this week: the next iPhone, which could be announced Monday. Says GigaOm: “…free Wi-Fi is vital for AT&T, which might be facing the worst kind of network usage with the launch of 3G iPhone. They need to offload as much traffic off the 3G network to Wi-Fi networks, whether at home, work or at Starbucks.”

GigaOm also has a copy of the lawsuit HERE.

Related stories:

• Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks — with restrictions (Gadgetress)
  
• Free Wi-Fi for certain AT&T customers (Gadgetress)
  
• McDonald’s cancels free wi-fi for Nintendo DS players (Fast Food Maven)
  
• Starbucks can’t handle demand for free Wi-Fi (MacWorld)

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.