Starbucks and WiFi?

It should work at any Starbucks or T-Mobile hot spot. You're contracting with T-Mobile and not with Starbucks. That means it will work at Borders, Red Roof Inn, airports, Kinko's, ad nasuium. blundered into one Starbucks that took both T-Mobile and IPass. may be other providers. Whether your cousin Vinny is within range of a suitable hot spot is subject to some investigation and testing.
Quite well.

It's a T-Mobile service - and you can sign up for a daily, monthly, unlimited, or pat per use service - for any hot spot that uses T-Mobile.
In the Starbucks case, your T-Mobile account will work at any Starbucks that has the WiFi / T-Mobile service.

Sorry to totally destroy your preconcieved notions and wrong headedness, but anytime I see someone propogating that false crap, I have to at least inform them that they are way stupid and totally WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So, obviously Mark McIntyre is not only a flaming friggen idiot, but he likes to call people names based on his stupidity and il-concieved WRONG notions.. Come to think of it, HE'S freeloading on this free newsgroup... :)

I haven't taken possession of my first Wi-Fi enabled laptop yet so pardon
the stupid question but what I want to know is if I sign up for monthly
unlimited Wifi at say Starbucks at a particular location, is the service
only at that location? Say I drive down the street to my cousin Vinny's
house a couple miles away, do I still have service? And if not, can I
go to another say Starbucks near my cousin Vinny's and have service there?
How does this stuff work?
TIA
dot

What does their website say? I seem to recall that, at least with locations around here, they have a central network so you can use their wifi from any location. Expensive though.
Came across an article (forget where) about a year ago regarding Starbucks and wifi. Seemed at one location, Starbucks was upset because someone was providing a free hotspot that overlapped into their location. Starbucks customers, of course, were using the free hotspot. Starbucks tried to get a court order to place an injunction against the free hotspot, but the judge (thankfully) threw it out of court.

It will depend on the access pack you purchase. For example I am in the UK using a 240 minutes a month pack (cost £2.00). This allows access at all BT Openzone sites - which includes all UK Starbucks sites.
I tried to use a service with Swissom recently and although I could buy a 24 hour pack - it only applied to the location I registered from - not much use IMO.

Why not just scan for any available network, if its not secure, just connect to it and surf to your hearts content. No need to pay!!!

As I read this, I wonder what The Old Man (Hiram Percy Maxim 1AW from amateur radio's earliest days) would have written about a situation like this. I'm sure he would have had plenty of opinions regarding computers, networking, and such matters. Rotten Computing, Rotten Networking, Rotten Wireless, etc.
- Nate >>

When you get your laptop, you drive down to Starbucks, turn on the computer, and open a web browser like Internet Explorer to any web page you like, and it will show you a Starbucks login page. Once you satisfy that, you should be able to connect to the Internet. If you subscribe to one of their plans, you should be able to connect at any T-Mobile site, which includes a lot of Starbucks, FedEx-Kinkos, Borders Books, ... There are T-Mobile sites, and "partner" sites where the login is a little different.
You can try it for free. says it expires in 2004, but the page is still there.
You won't get that Starbucks anymore. Maybe Vinny has his own connection you can borrow, or a friendly neighbor. The reliable range with you new laptop will probably be the parking lot of Starbucks, which I prefer to the interior, usually.
Any other Starbucks, FedEx, Borders ...
Fundamentally, there are three types of access points. Locked points that are for private or corporate use; open points that allow various kinds of logins for subscribers, or maybe for coffee shopt patrons or hotel guests; and open points that are wide open with no logins, either intentionally or unintentionally by someone who doesn't know how to lock the access point in their house.

The only reason I can think of is that its illegal*.....
.... oh, and immoral. But that doesn't seem to bother /some/ freeloaders.
(* unless said network is a free public hotspot of course. Accessing a private network which is insecure is no more legal than entering a house or borrowing a car which someone forgot to lock)

One the clever neighborhood brats decided to celebrate the installation of his new cable modem and wireless router by setting up a captive portal that points to his web page from hell. Just about everything on the initial web page is either a software bomb, IE bug exploit, or user trap. I was setting up a neighbors wireless client so they can connect to my access point across the street. That's when I noticed the new SSID. Can I resist the temptation to connect? Of course not. I connect and find the browser plastered with endless open windows and screams of alarm from MS Anti-Spyware and AVG Anti-Virus. The sound card was simultaneously spewing screaming noises. I went for the power switch. I guess this is what over-educated 14 year olds do in their spare time instead of spray painting walls with graffiti. When I confronted the brat and asked what he was trying to accomplish, he mentioned that the scripts and setup for doing it are available for download (somewhere). I threatened him with violence if he didn't get rid of his wireless trap, and then complimented him on a job well done. I'm not sure that was such a great idea as I'm sure he'll soon do something else even more devious.
So, feel free to try and connect to any random router, take your chances with the legal issues, and beware of 14 year old brats with wireless routers.

"Mark McIntyre" wrote
Accessing an open wireless network has been ruled, at least in one court, as legal.
The ethics of doing such can (and should) be questioned, but at least one court case ruled that the responibility of closing off the wireless network falls upon the operator. (Don't have the URL offhand, but should find it in a google.)
I suspect as home wireless become more and more popular, the manufacturers are going to start implimenting initial setup routines that will guide the user to setting up, at mininum, their networks with unique SSIDs and encryption by default.
One of my SSIDs is completetly open, by intent. Neighbors use it often from their back porch. I have it labeled as such by including "_OPEN" in the SSID name. Would like to see such convention for initially open SSIDs used more frequently.
Cheers, -Eric

LOL, hard to say whether to laugh or be mad at the little brat.
Well, I guess his silly little "wireless trap" is better than egging houses, blowing up mailboxes, ect. :^)
Cheers, -Eric

If that had been true, the story would have been all over the usual news sources. (actually internet.com) look for things like that in the news and haven't seen anything of the sort. In case I missed something, a fast search of the above news sites for court decisions showed nothing. US or elsewhere? Was it a criminal trial or a civil suit over violations of terms of service? Was it an actual judgement, administrative ruling, or did someone just drop the whole thing in disgust? Any clues or references? Approximate time frame?

Once again, you are showing your idiocy.. There is not a single law, federal or state, relating to using WiFi sites to access computers... Check the laws at Contrary to your provably false and lunatic statement, guess what, if there are no laws against it, it CAN'T be illegal!

Don't worry, you don't.
If you believe that you're a fool, if you don't then you're a knave and either way, disingenuous and misleading to others. But I'm not interested in debating it with you as you're never going to agree with me, and I'm never going to agree with you.
I don't recall having called you or anyone else names. Seems to me its you thats getting defensive and calling names. Perhaps there's some reason?
Last time I checked, I was paying my news-provider to get access. Go figure.

That reference is bogus.
Its part of a larger article noting that the existing laws are a muddle, and it goes on to say that merely connecting involuntarily may be a crime. It cites Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the federal Wiretap Law which both make it a federal offense to intercept communications in transmission.

This is unfortunately untrue. There are in some states a muddle of laws, but if any state had ruled as above, it would have been headline news in every computer newspaper in the world.