Dear Starbucks and AT&T: fix your WiFi!

Technology on the road has a rep­u­ta­tion for being finicky, whether “on the road” means the other side of the world or just down the street.

Some of this dif­fi­culty is unavoid­able when orga­ni­za­tions are deal­ing with peo­ple con­nect­ing with a wide vari­ety of equip­ment in a wide vari­ety of cir­cum­stances. (Think Mac OS X and Apple’s lim­ited hard­ware vs. Windows deal­ing with the vagaries of PC hard­ware.) But other tech­nol­ogy chal­lenges are eas­ily reme­died through decent design and forethought.

Case in point: con­nect­ing to the AT&T WiFi at Starbucks. I am an irreg­u­lar Starbucks cus­tomer — but enough of one to have a pre-paid Starbucks card. Occasionally I use wire­less pro­vided by AT&T to check my email or do some read­ing while I drink my cof­fee and, in fact, the con­sis­tent exis­tence of wire­less is a rea­son I choose Starbucks.

(I sus­pect this use makes me pretty much the tar­get audi­ence for Starbucks, even if my tech­ni­cal knowl­edge — I am a for­mer Web devel­oper and sys­tems admin­is­tra­tor — per­haps gives me more famil­iar­ity with the under­ly­ing tech­nol­ogy and design issues than some other customers.)

I have no trou­ble con­nect­ing to the 802.11 sig­nal (“attwifi”). (My tech­nol­ogy works fine.) It isn’t until I actu­ally am con­nected that the trou­ble starts.

First, I’m greeted by a Starbucks screen with an orange AT&T bar at the top. There’s a box for a user name, a drop down con­fus­ingly labeled “Make a Selection,” a pass­word box, a check­box for me to agree to term of ser­vice — and then two but­tons, one labeled “Connect to the Internet” and the other labeled “Log In.”

OK, well, I’ve done this before (though it’s been a while), and I believe I already have an account. So even though what I really want to do is con­nect to the Internet, I’m going to try fill­ing in my login info and click­ing log in first.

So I put in my user name, then hit the drop­down box. There are 14 options, none of which say “Starbucks.” Hmm. Well, this is AT&T WiFi, so I guess I need to select that one. But wait, there’s three choices labeled AT&T! Which one am I? I sup­pose I’ll just try the first one, and see if it works.

So I put in my pass­word (I think it’s the right pass­word — it’s been a while since I last used the ser­vice), accept the terms, and click on the log in box (I hope that’s the right thing to do).

Instead of con­nect­ing to the Internet, I instead get a screen telling me that my email address hasn’t been val­i­dated, and I won’t be allowed to con­tinue until it is. Find, it looks like I can send a val­i­da­tion email from this screen — but wait, I can’t con­nect to the Internet, so how am I sup­posed to see the email?

The screen also sug­gests that I must not have val­i­dated my email address prop­erly before — but as far as I can remem­ber, I’ve never been sent a val­i­da­tion email from AT&T any­way! So I guess, despite being a Starbucks cus­tomer, I don’t get to use the WiFi today, and won’t be able to until I get home and track down this val­i­da­tion email? What if it never comes? Do I have to return to Starbucks to try ask­ing for another one?

Perhaps I logged into the wrong account. After all, I am a Starbucks cus­tomer, not an AT&T one, right? And I have a valid pre-paid Starbucks card (which I just used to buy my cool­ing cof­fee.) I’ll try going to Starbucks.com to see if there’s some­thing about a Starbucks account or another way to login or access my account.

Starbucks.com only partly loads (why?!), but at the bot­tom there’s a link to “your account,” so I’ll try that.

Great, a login screen that’s branded with the store I’m actu­ally in! My login works, but I’m not pre­sented with much about WiFi. Still, WiFi is men­tioned near “Account Management,” so I’ll try that.

OK, now on the left is “WiFi Info,” which sounds promis­ing. Now I get a link to “cre­ate an AT&T account,” so I guess I’ll try that (do I already have one?) It says my pre­paid card is my “ticket to free and easy Wireless access at Starbucks,” so that’s a good sign.

Unfortunately, the link appears to be bro­ken. Hmm. I see two other lap­tops here online, so I guess I’ll try reload­ing. OK, that worked, now I get a screen “Starbucks Card Rewards with WiFi.” That sort of works. Now at least I have a “Sign Up” but­ton to try.

This looks pos­i­tive. I can sign in with my account on Starbucks.com. That sounds good, since I know that work, right? I just used it, after all.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. When I try to put my infor­ma­tion in, I get the con­fus­ing response — pre­sented in red as an error mes­sage — that I already have an account. Um, yeah, I know I already have a Starbucks account, that’s what I’m using! (Oh, you mean, I already have an AT&T account? Why don’t you say so! And that isn’t very helpful.)

Now what?

I give up and go home, not want­ing to return to Starbucks again, and not inter­ested in deal­ing with AT&T ever again.