At long last, free Starbucks Wi-fi – but read the fine print

As promised back in February, Starbucks on Tuesday finally unveiled its new, AT&T-powered Wi-Fi service that gives customers free wireless Internet access under certain conditions.

If you've got one of those ubiquitous Starbucks pre-paid cards, you can register it and, as long as it's got $5 on it and you use it once a month, you can have a single session of 2 hours of free Wi-Fi each day.

If you're an AT&T DSL customer, you have free Wi-Fi, without any time limits.

There are some indications that iPhone customers may get free Wi-Fi as well. For a brief period of time last month, iPhone users were able to sign on, enter their numbers and start surfing. However, the gateway was abruptly closed - apparently its opening was an error. Nevertheless, keep an eye on Steve Jobs' keynote on Monday at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, where the next-generation iPhone is expected to be launched. There's a good chance he'll announce free Starbucks Wi-Fi there.

For those folks who don't fit into these categories, there's still relatively good news. The new AT&T deal also dramatically lowers prices at Starbucks for paid Wi-Fi, as low as $3.99 for two hours. That's much cheaper than T-Mobile's old rate of $6 per hour, but you'd be a lot smarter to just get a Starbucks card and slap $5 on it, which gets you two hours of free Wi-Fi a day for a month.

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