AT&T a pain-in-the-ass for T-Mobile customers.

It seems like every few weeks, T-Mobile HotSpot subscribers are getting the shaft from AT&T at Starbucks, thanks to AT&T taking over the infrastructure for wireless Internet access at Starbucks locations. According to the transition, while AT&T will be taking over the hardware and maintenance of these hotspots, T-Mobile HotSpot subscribers should still have full access to wireless ‘net a access at Starbucks.

While we’ve had mostly smooth sailing with wireless Internet at Starbucks since the deal with AT&T was penned, every couple weeks there’s a major hiccup. In these instances, loading up a web-browser presents users with the typical Starbucks loading page, with a link at the top to access a T-Mobile HotSpot account. That link works too, but as soon as one’s T-Mobile phone number is entered in the username field, along with the associated password, the Internet connection is denied. This denial is illustrated in one of two ways:

1. A very unhelpful T-Mobile web page that says, “We’re sorry – proxied.” There’s a link to a service support FAQ that can’t be accessed thanks to the lack of Internet access, and a support number that takes a hour to get through to a HotSpot support tech.
2. An AT&T web page that kindly points out that the connection was rejected, prompting for a new username and password. Naturally, trying to input one’s T-Mobile HotSpot username/password into these fields leads to absolutely no success.

More frustrating is the fact that the two error results come up seemingly randomly, with perhaps a slight bias towards the AT&T error. Additionally, this problem seems to be occurring at Starbucks locations throughout San Francisco. After loading the initial login page and retrying to input one’s account information from scratch, there’s generally no change in status, but twice when we’ve encountered this error, it’s taken about an hour to resolve.

This hiccup may be linked to the transition of Starbucks’ wi-fi to AT&T’s able incompetent hands, but if that’s the case, one wouldn’t think this problem would come-and-go for months on end. Even the “proxied” error never came up before the AT&T transition announcement, so we’re adamant that AT&T is to blame. Thank the gods we’re not a subscriber of theirs anymore (SBC DSL FTL), and we’ll be quite angry if thee issues continue. If they do, bet your shorts that we’ll tether the living crap out of a 3G iPhone just to get AT&T back.

Tagged as: california, computers, internet, iphone, mendax.org, san francisco