Yesterday while waiting on a friend in an unfamiliar city, an AT&T location dropped connection on me after an hour. (“could not find the server at blahblah.com”) No big deal, I’m getting used to this by now, I officially disconnect from the Starbucks wifi and then reconnect. No luck. I turn off my AirPort, wait a bit, and turn it back on. No luck with that either. So I go with the last technique that usually works, shut down and then bring the computer back up. Still nothing.

An hour and a half of intermittent trying the above techniques and others, I just gave up and left since I’d run out of things I could do offline. Fortunately, my friend got out of work soon after.

Anyone else have this happening? And is it just me, or does it come across as an extremely unsubtle way of trying to either 1) make people switch to AT&T or 2) automatedly “kick out” people who Starbucks corporate thinks are unprofitable?

I figured out the problem….

…Lots of people (myself included) are experiencing authentication failures because the login servers are unable to keep up with the traffic. The presentation of this is: invalid username and/or password.

A quick call to the Starbucks Card customer service confirmed that they’ve been fielding questions about the service outage, but according to Michael (the frazzled [rep] that answered my call), they don’t have an ETA for the outage resolution. They’re hoping for service restoration soon, but no guarantees.

http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/6/free_att_wifi_swamps_starbucks_servers

Same problem as B Knotts. I can’t log in but can log in to the maintenance page. However, if I select the “forgot password” link (even though I know it!) and then let it generate a password for me, it works. Pain in the butt though!!!
What’s going on???

Exact same thing a B Knotts….

It’s good to know that I am not the only one with problems. It seems that in some stores T-Mobile works, and in others ATT works. My guess is that the staff is immune to the problem, tech support is a hassle, and T-Mobile has this who undertaking in the rear view mirror, hence leaving customers sucking the gas pipe….

I can, while I’m connected, log into the AT&T account maintenance page, so I know I’ve got the proper username/password. I just enter my basic username and pick “AT&T Wifi” from the drop-down menu. Hopefully, that’s the right way, although I also tried appending “@attwifi.com” just for laughs. Still no go.

First time it took 18 minutes before the sbsglobal.something.com website authenticated me. The next time it took 1 hour and I could not connect. The only other person in the place said it took him half an hour before his Dell connected. I tried with both Mac OS X and Windows on separate machines.

When you connect to attwifi it still actually goes through some T-Mobil network to connect to the Southwestern Bell (SBC?) type old AT&T server to validate and that is ugly in responding.

Glad someone is exposing this BS service.

Imran