Today, at Wired‘s Disruptive by Design conference, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that, beginning July 1st, Starbucks will offer free WiFi internet access in every one of its American stores. No time limit, no registration required.
Right now, patrons are only allowed to surf for two hours at a time, and have to have a Starbucks card in order to get access. By this fall, Starbucks will also be rolling out The Starbucks Digital Network, offering free access to a number of for-pay-only sites to its customers.
Starbucks Digital Network websites will include iTunes, The New York Times, Patch, USA TODAY, The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo! and ZAGAT.
This mean that for every Starbucks store, there will be a zone of free WiFi, and so for many urban living Americans, this may mean that it will be difficult to find somewhere without free WiFi. Other areas will not be quite so fortunate.
As Twitter user @sfslim notes (h/t Boing Boing), “Sadly, given @Starbucks ubiquity, this may be the closest we get to nationwide municipal Internet access for years.”
(via ReadWriteWeb.)
