All the mom-and-pop coffee shops offer free Wi-Fi. In fact, most everyone does except Starbucks. The Seattle-based coffee house gets its hotspot piped in by T-Mobile. It’s been reported for years that store managers at Starbucks has been complaining to upper management for a while about losing business because customers don’t want to pay for their Internet after forking out $4 on a foo-foo drink. Whelp, looks like someone somewhere got through, because now T-Mobile is offering free weekend use of its Wi-Fi…kind of.

With T-Mobile, there always seems to be a catch and the catch for the free hotspot at Starbucks and other T-Mobile locations, such as Borders, is that you have to be a T-Mobile cellular customer.

To get started on your free Internet surfing this weekend, just visit T-Mobile’s Free Weekends site and fill out the form and then within a minute or two, your phone will receive an SMS message (which you get charged for) with a code to crack open that free surfing while at Starbucks.

Be prepared, my friend, to fend off many questions from others on just how you’re getting free access on your device. It may just be easier to say you hacked your way in. ;)

[tags]wi-fi,t-mobile,hotspot,starbucks,borders,free weekends[/tags]