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AT&T Disables Free iPhone Wi-Fi (For Now)
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Yeah, arn they did. Not iPhone specifically but all ATT wireless customers "in the near future" at the time they offered the free service to ATT home broadband customers. And legitimate Stateside iPhone users are by requirement ATT wireless customer.
I know someone highly place at ATT. They didn't care about the spoofing, not for now at any rate. This has to do with a potentially messy divorce in some regions between T-Mo and Starbucks, and Starbucks blinked, and as ATT does have the ongoing, future contract with Starbucks, ATT agreed to demure and cut any free service for *wireless customers* in *some regions* until T-Mo quits whining or Starbucks brings the legal department hammer down on them.
I'm assured T-Mo's complaints are baseless; they're contract was very loose, as they made the lion's share of the money, not Starbucks. Starbucks could pretty much change providers at any time with no obligation to T-Mo. What happened, also, was Starbucks customers are idiots and thought by signing up with T-Mo they had a relationship with Starbucks for WiFi, not T-Mo -- this is of course insanely stupid, but this what they thought. So when ATT's access point kept trying to capture their logins, they started calling and freaking out about how they had so many hours or so many days of service left with "Starbucks WiFi I bought and paid for". So it's two moronic groups gang-piling on Starbucks at the moment.
Anyway, ATT decided not to make life difficult for Starbucks in cutting lose what was the top-quality GSM and WiFi access-point provider in the States, and is fast becoming a garbage service. (I was a T-Mo customer, and I was there for the slide, the service add-on gouge [$50 EDGE data plans w/ monthly transfer caps!], the ridiculous calling-circle answer to rollover minutes, etc. So they cut free iPhone service at Starbucks to shut T-Mo the hell up and help out Starbucks. They only cut Barnes & Noble iPhone freebie, too, because so many of them have a Starbucks attached, and you could just hit B&N's WiFi from within the Starbucks.
Again, this is regional. I live in ATT Wireless home country, and my free iPhone service stills works at Starbucks and B&N.
How in tarnation could you forsake Peet's for Starbucks?
Alfred Peet must be rolling in his grave (RIP).
To be more specific then,
"AT&T has never officially announced free Wifi to iPhone users."
The point being: the original poster thought AT&T had always included Wifi access as part of iPhone service plans, I was informing him that they had not.
arn
Yes, I found this out yesterday when I went back to the very same Starbucks as the day before and discovered I no longer had the option for free WiFi on my iPhone. Wasn't there the whole deal that you had to have a registered Starbucks card in order to get the Free WiFi? Maybe that's why they took it away for now.
Oh well...
Oh well...
isn't unlimited web access included in the rate plan? or is this something else?
http://www.apple.com/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html
I don't have an iphone, but maybe one day. This confuses me quite a bit though.
http://www.apple.com/iphone/easysetup/rateplans.html
I don't have an iphone, but maybe one day. This confuses me quite a bit though.
Good job, cheaters, ruining it for the rest of us. There are always people trying to get something for nothing and now everyone suffers for their dishonesty. Thanks a lot.
Yes, but this is about speed.
See the comparison that shows how much faster web access is at a Wifi hotspot.
AT&T offers unlimited "EDGE" (cellular) data access with all their iPhone plans. This uses cell phone towers to provide wireless access. This is included in the rate plan and available in most areas where you get a cell phone signal. The main disadvantage of EDGE is it is slow.
The iPhone also has Wifi that you can use to access Wifi basestations. So at home you can connect up to your Wifi router and access the internet much faster.
If you go to a coffee shop such as Starbucks, they have Wifi, but it costs extra $$ to use. The rates typically run $20/month extra for unlimited access. You can still use EDGE if you want, but Wifi is much faster.
On wednesday, AT&T allowed iPhones to access their Wifi hotspots for free. Before that you had to pay extra. Yesterday, they shut it down again, so you have to pay to use Wifi at AT&T hotspots.
arn
How the hell is limiting it to paying customers and not giving random people access for free "greedy"?
I can't blame them for turning it off until they work out a way to limit it to iPhones and not other machines pretending to be iPhones. This probably would have stayed up if people hadn't used it with other machines - as stampyhead said, the cheaters ruined it for genuine iPhone users.
But I'm sure they'll work out the security issues and have it back up before long.
Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419.3)
They will bring it back soon, I hope.
They will bring it back soon, I hope.
Well, considering that 99% of the rest of the US has FREE wi-fi access, I have exactly ZERO sympathy for you or anyone else bummed out by this...
How in tarnation could you forsake Peet's for Starbucks?
Alfred Peet must be rolling in his grave (RIP).
The new Peets here still has its training wifi on, the Starbucks wants that username/password thing, the local independent coffee shop has good wifi, but is snotty and expensive. The best around here? Safeway, of all places.
It is 2008 and high speed connections still suck and/or cost way too much.
Yesterday a number of people were reporting on ways to cheat the system and connect their laptops using their iPhone number. Today the service is gone. Does anyone see the connection?
Why do some of you always think that you have the right to do what you please and ignore every rule that gets in your way? Now AT&T will need to impose some pain the the a-- log in method to keep you jerks out. As always, the cheats may have ruined it for the rest of us.
Dave
Why do some of you always think that you have the right to do what you please and ignore every rule that gets in your way? Now AT&T will need to impose some pain the the a-- log in method to keep you jerks out. As always, the cheats may have ruined it for the rest of us.
Dave
I agree with you 100%. The amazing thing is that the low-life idiots responsible for this well never understand your anger.
Dave
Check. Yeah, I wonder how they got that idea, but with the free WiFi access for ATT's broadband customers, I suppose new iPhone customers just stretched it. It was actually your post however long ago first alerted me we ATT wireless customers would indeed be getting free ATT commercial WiFi.
Also, I read elsewhere (MacWorld) that the attwifi SSID is pointing to the tmobile authentication servers. That's, ah, whack. It's that both access points are still active, T-Mos are weaker but spike signal strength, and if you've ever learned any T-Mo access point and any ATT commercial WiFi access point, your iPhone will keep popping to the strongest signal. When they're about equal it just sort of coin tosses, so you can try to authenticate with your ATT wireless number and that data gets sent to T-Mo's access point and returns a invalid account page. Network technical term for this issue: clusterf***.
Now with a Mac laptop, where you can more easily (pull-down menu) select the SSID you want, no problem. Anyway, mine still works. In fact, I'm not convinced the service is actually down. My buddy at ATT just said both are operating, not specifically free iPhone access has been cut -- I was speculating about why they would cut free B&N access, too, based on description on his description of the walking-on-eggshells deal; I should have made that clear.
What may be happening is that people who think they can't authenticate via their iPhones are actually getting their authentication login captured by T-Mo's SSID. Wouldn't surprise me a bit if those monkeys at T-Mo tweaked their Hotspot network to do a better jobbing of capturing data.
Try deleting "tmobile" out of your list of known SSIDs, but "attwifi". If that fixes and you have the time, call Starbucks, like the regional manager in your area, explain the detail. Then call T-Mo USA corporate, get as high as you can -- ask for the corporate counsel's office -- and ask them just how much they're interested in thousands of complaints pouring into FCC for willful malicious interference on the 2.4GHz spectrum to a subscription wireless service for which you have lawful access. If they're okay with that, ask them how they think FCC will feel about the US operations of the mobile/wireless arm of the German government's socialized telecommunications operations creating this interference with an American company's service, especially after all those nasty things the Germans have said about America over the last few years.
ATTENTION ANY GERMAN NATIONALS READING THIS: I love Germany. Have friends there. One of my three fave nations in the EU. I'm just trying to get something accomplished here. It's Americans running T-Mo USA, not Germans. But the implication is strong and expedient pressure... Well, sometimes the ends justify the means.
On Wednesday, we reported that AT&T had begun offering free Wi-Fi access to iPhone users at many of their national Wi-Fi hotspots, including Starbucks and Barnes & Noble locations.
No official announcement had been made, however, and AT&T representatives reportedly declined to comment. Today, many users are reporting that the free iPhone access has been removed and users are unable to log-in with just their phone number. This appears to be true at locations that were verified to offer the free Wi-Fi access just days before.
Based on the screenshot and wording of the login page ("Free AT&T Wi-Fi for iPhone"), there can be no doubt that the service was intentional, but it appears it may have been launched prematurely. Regardless, we still expect the service to be officially announced in the future.
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I got an email from ATT about two days ago talking about Free Wi-Fi at these locations, but this could also be because I have there DSL service as well.
If you are a legit ATT wireless customer, ATT could care less if you use your laptop. The plan is for all ATT wireless customers for any phone to get free access to their commercial WiFI operations. The reason it was iPhone only was slow rollout, so to test system usage and not overload things right off the bat. Same reason they made no public announcement.
It was just a simple login system for iPhone users. Don't think they don't have the MAC addresses of the devices that access the system. If it matches an iPhone no problem. If it matches a MacBook, but the phone number matches an iPhone plan, they call you up, you can go read them your MacBook MAC address in a hurry, I suspect no problem. But if you can't, you might just lose your free access forever for giving out your phone number for the purpose. Although it's hard to prove someone didn't just know your mobi number and that you had an iPhone.
Two excellent ideas, particularly the SMS one. On a related note, does anyone really know if they care that you use your laptop versus an iPhone. I would bet that they don't, and they just want to make sure that only AT&T customers (whether DSL or Cellphone) use the wiFi --- no matter the actual device used. This is also why your "enter-your-phone-number-and-receive-SMS-login-code" is a great idea. In fact, although it probably wouldn't be that difficult to come up with, you should email your idea to AT&T wireless!
Indeed, It would most likely SAVE AT&T money to push iPhone users onto WiFi at starbucks (and all locations with AT&T wifi hotspots for that matter). You are most certainly correct.. I can only imagine the cost savings of moving tens of thousands of users onto simple broadband connections and reducing the need for capacity, bandwidth, and maintenance of many cell towers in those areas -- all the while your customers think THEY are receiving a special benefit. It's so simple. Not sure why I didn't think of it this way before.
I would guess the ability to receive anything free would be the overriding mindset...
DSL service
ATT is missing a way to limit the demands on their Edge and 3G networks by not allowing the use of their wifi spots.
