• You won’t be able to find a place to sit down anymore if more people are coming in to use their computers. I thought a coffee shop was for drinking coffee.
• Santa Clarita, Calif. resident Ted Thompson • Getting really angry over Starbucks’ unlimited wi-fi service. See, the problem that Thompson doesn’t seem to understand is that Starbucks is that coffee shops were never about drinking coffee. They all have coffee, sure, but they’re social beasts in nature, plus they encourage people to read the news or play checkers while they’re there. But, with laptops, people don’t have to do that anymore. The social element is online. If you want good coffee instead of a place filled with laptops, try somewhere that doesn’t have wi-fi. Just a tip. And get out of our way  so that we can blog in peace, kind sir! source

• It had reached a point where it was affecting sales. For years, Starbucks was one of the few coffee-shop chains that didn’t have free wi-fi, instead charging high fees for usage. Then, they gave Starbucks Card holders two hours free. Now, they’re opening it up for everybody July 1st – and using their clout to sweeten the deal, big time. The details:

• yesIt’ll be a simple process to log in – just hit a button and you’re on. You can stay as long as you want, bucking the independent coffee shop trend away from moochers.
• noThat’s not all – they’ll offer free access to pay sites like The Wall Street Journal, and free music and movie previews. Holy crap. This could be big, everybody. source

• good AT&T will FINALLY allow data tethering via the iPhone, after blocking it for years.
• bad AT&T will no longer offer unlimited data plans, but instead two tiered data plans.
• okay Old customers won’t be forced to switch, but new customers will have no choice.

The new charges

• $15the cost per month for the 200-megabyte “DataPlus” plan; it’s $15 for each additional 200 megs
• $25 the cost per month for the 2-gigabyte “DataPro” plan; it’s $10 for each additional gigabyte

The bullet points

• » Why do this, anyway? Because AT&T found in its research that most customers only used a certain amount of data, and a small number of users accounted for most of the bandwidth-sucking data usage. Take that as you will, kids. On the plus side, AT&T is at least trying to make the new charges somewhat friendly to consumers, allowing for retroactive changes between the two plans.
• » The wildcard, of course? AT&T is the first company to do this. Which means that Verizon, Sprint, all those other companies? They still have unlimited data plans. And if Verizon gets the iPhone like is being predicted, it seriously puts them at an advantage. source

• $89.99 for unlimited voice and text if you are on Verizon – which is a good deal, but doesn’t include data plans (though those have been improved quite a it)
• $89.99 for the same thing from AT&T – unless you’re on a smartphone like an iPhone, in which case you can get unlimited with a data plan for $119.99 source