There were few things that frustrated me about Starbucks quite as much as its Wi-Fi policy. There was the weird smell, the pervasive corporate atmosphere, the hipsterier-than-thou baristas, but none of it really held a candle to the fact that I had to pay for Wi-Fi if I was in a Starbucks.

It looks like the coffee chain has finally caught on and will be rolling out free Wi-Fi for all customers starting July 1. The catch (you knew there would be one)? Starbucks will be using the service to roll out all sorts of targeted media trash for your unsolicited enjoyment.

Really, it probably won’t be so bad. There won’t be any advertising, just free versions of Starbucks-approved WSJ, NYT and other publishers’ content. You’ll get access to the Starbucks iTunes download of the week as well.

AT&T has a revolutionary and imaginative solution to its network congestion problems in places like NYC: Wi-Fi. Okay, so it’s neither revolutionary or imaginative, but it could actually work.

AT&T plans to rollout free Wi-Fi across Times Square as a test bed for traffic offloading. The idea is that all those crazy people stomping around one of the most active city hubs will use the Wi-Fi network to upload pictures and Facebook posts and shoot off emails to mom and dad about their visit to the Big Apple, instead of relying on AT&T 3G. The result would be thousands of gigs of data traversing a much wider pipeline, giving you the chance to, I dunno, make a reliable phone call for a change.

The only thing is, the network has to actually work. I can see this thing getting a solid rollout and then bombing, which will undoubtedly result in a big data push as angry users send their rants to Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress accounts, all back on the old 3G pipeline. Done right, though, this could be a huge boost to congested network performance. Remind me again, why did it take until 2010 for this become a reality?

Photo from: Declan McCullagh