I was at the car dealership this morning, feeling a bit grumpy that Wi-Fi isn’t ubiquitous yet. But at least T-Mobile is doing their part.
T-Mobile is the mobile subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. Unless you’ve been buried under a rock, you know that they’re aggressively expanding into the United States using the classic Catherine Zeta-Jones Overexposure strategy as detailed in The Art Of War.
Currently, T-Mobile provides Wi-Fi hotspots at around 1,600 locations in our fair country, including airports and somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,200 Starbucks (which, coincidentally, always seems to be somewhere in the neighborhood). This makes them the U.S.’s largest provider of Wi-Fi hotspots, ahead of Boingo and Wayport.
Today they announced their intentions to put Wi-Fi hotspots at around 400 Borders bookstores early next year. (This may not be as impressive as it sounds, BTW, since half the Borders in this area seem to have a Starbucks attached to them.)
As cool as this is, I can’t afford to double what I spend for broadband Internet access, even if T-Mobile starts putting it in places where I actually hang out. IMHO, T-Mobile needs to start thinking about roaming agreements with cable and DSL service providers — not to mention Boingo and Wayport — right now.