AT&T will deploy Wi-Fi ‘hotzones’ to supplement mobile broadband; New York City, San Francisco first

By on Dec 29, 2010 at 3:33 AM
General December 29, 2010

What’s better than a hotspot? A hotzone of course. Yesterday, the nation’s second largest cellular provider, AT&T, announced a new initiative that will bring free Wi-Fi to large, populous areas. The move will, according to the announcement, “supplement” mobile broadband coverage in certain areas. “Following a successful pilot program, AT&T today announced plans to expand its deployment of AT&T Wi-Fi hotzones to additional locations in major markets, starting with the expansion of its existing Times Square Wi-Fi hotzone and new hotzones near Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” reads the press release. “In addition, AT&T plans to launch its next Wi-Fi hotzone in San Francisco’s popular Embarcadero Center.” AT&T says hotzones will “enhance the broadband experience for AT&T customers” who live in these urban areas.

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  • Anonymous

    Its so easy to argue this I don’t even wanna try

    • Anonymous

      Allow me. “Our network sucks….heres some WIFI to use”

    • Anonymous

      or, we suck so much we can only give you WiFi, not even WiFi calling!

  • 1T2dirtnap

    I guess this is what you do when your network sucks in these areas!

  • Stackid

    This makes complete sense in dense, populated areas. If you were a carrier with such data intensive devices you would do the same thing.

  • Steel

    In other news, due to its inability to keep up w/ Donut demand, Krispy Kreme will begin giving away salami sandwiches.

    Nice business model.

  • Shanghai Dan

    Great, let’s drain our phone batteries at a massively higher rate by using an WIFI connection, rather than 3G…

    • http://www.facebook.com/robert.dunn1 Robert Dunn

      Actually, Wi-Fi uses much less battery power than 3G…think about it..the shorter range of a Wi-Fi connection vs. the long distance a 3G signal has to travel means the transmitter emits less power which translates to better battery life.

    • http://twitter.com/peterjohn Peter John

      Sorry Dan. Your attempt at sarcasm kinda sucked.

      The only way this would kill battery more is if the Wifi signal was weak enough to make your phone keep hopping back and forth between your cellular radio and wifi radio. For ATT users, it might be exacerbated by the fact that your cellular radio also bounces between edge and hspa :P

  • t-west

    Hmm, sounds like AT&T doesn’t want to get blasted when huge amounts of people can’t make video calls with their iPhones at the New Years Eve event. I’m sure they”ll use footage of such a call to strike back at the T-Mobile commercials…..now they just need to make their entire network a “Hotzone”.

    • Mgl323

      I think you just nailed it.

  • Drew

    Why are you still toying around with “coffee wifi”, where’s your LTE AT&T?? How lame…. just give up already.

  • Tech_User

    instead of fixing their network, they are just giving up and setting up wifi hotspots oh AT&T……..

  • Anonymous

    People always have something to say when they don’t even live in the area. I live in the SF Bay area. No problems at all. 5300 down. 1300 up. 5 bars all day.

    • Drew

      You’re 1 of 50 people in town. There is a reason AT&T chose those two places and it’s because they are NOTORIOUSLY the worst places in the country especially for iPhone users. And since it’s a pain in the ass to get a tower up in SF (local laws and ordinances) that is what they have to resort to. Sad…

  • CMC

    “The network that you pay for doesn’t work that well. Meanwhile we are charging you to use every single bit of info that you may or may not receive. We’re also charging for every phone call that you will undoubtedly drop. And no, we will not credit you for that (we removed that feature from the billing system some time ago). To make up for these shortcomings, feel free to stand in one spot and use this wi-fi supplement. You should be so grateful that we will not even charge you for this. Yet.”

  • http://twitter.com/Gambler0 Cody R.

    Translation:

    It’ll make our slow network speeds a little bit less slow, so people will stop bitching so much.

  • MicroNix

    First it was AT&T blaming the iPhone.

    Then came the iPhone were-does-my-network-suck app.

    Then came the big infrastructure upgrades.

    Now comes WIFI to the rescue? Seriously? What’s next?

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