Verizon, Barnes and Noble to Offer Free Wi-Fi

In the past week both Verizon and Barnes and Noble have announced they will now offer free Wi-Fi to their customers. Barnes and Noble used to offer AT&T’s Wi-Fi for a fee, but will now make it free of charge in nearly 800 stores. Verizon previously offered free Wi-Fi to just its business customers but will now also offer it to its residential FIOS and upper tier DSL customers as well.

Barnes and Noble’s decision is most likely an effort to regain some of the customers it’s lost to e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle. Their recent announcement that they have joined up with the upcoming Plastic Logic reader and will offer over 700,000 e-books is another indication they are finally taking the exploding e-book market seriously.

Verizon’s free Wi-Fi offering is through a partnership with Boingo Wireless, which boasts over 30,000 hotspots around the country. Verizon however is quick to point out that not all of them will be made available to their customers, but that “thousands” would be.

I happen to be a Verizon DSL customer so I registered for the new Wi-Fi service and downloaded the software. The first attempt promptly crashed IE but the next one went smoothly. Once the installation was complete I loaded the Hotspot Finder, plugged in my location (New York City) and found-4 hotspots. That’s it. A couple of hotels and a Starbucks. Now I wasn’t expecting those thousands of hotspots to be right here in the city, but 4 hotspots in an area this large seems a bit well..lame. Perhaps more will be added in the future though. The software does work just fine though.

Ironically, despite being the top cellular provider in the country, Verizon’s Wi-Fi service works for netbooks and laptops only, not smart phones. Verizon promises this will change sometime in the future though. For now though, if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or any other Wi-Fi enable device other than an actual computer, you’re out of luck.