For most of the last year, I turned off wifi auto-discovery on my iPhone just because it was too annoying to have it latch onto all of the Starbucks in-store networks that were “open” but required a “username”, “password”, and “money” to connect to the non-iTunes Internet. In many places in the universe, this would not be such an ordeal, but in Seattle it’s hard (but getting slightly easier [mb]) to walk a few blocks without accidentally falling into a Starbucks wifi cloud.

Now, however, those days of trivial annoyance might turn into ones serendipitous free higher speed wireless. After hemming and hawing, releasing and retracting, and any other stop–start analogies you’d like to use, AT&T has granted the ever-growing iPhone userbase free access to its 17,000 wifi hotspots, many of which are (sorry, t-mobile) beaming their waves of internet from somewhere in the vicinity of a mermaid logo. They “know what’s hot.” [at&t]

(via gizmodo [#] via the internet)

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