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t-mobile rolls out wi-fi at kinkos

wi-fi net news is reporting T-Mobile Rolls out Kinko's Stores, Discusses Roaming which i think is pretty big news. i think tmo gets bashed a lot for not opening up their wi-fi network, but i'm going to defend them. we'd all like to take our wi-fi card and have it work wherever there is a commercial hotspot, and have roaming charges billed back to whomever we bought our plan from - but in these days of the wi-fi wild west, t-mobile is very carefully building a wi-fi brand by making exclusive deals with top notch wi-fi necessary hang outs. borders, starbucks, and now kinkos.

i've been doing a lot of meetings in starbucks these days, and i am amazed at the number of people working or holding meetings in sbux using wi-fi. the other day, at the "streets of woodfield" starbucks, a large mall suburbia near chicago, i counted 10 separate meetings where at least one person was using wi-fi, and in a few cases, two or three. the borders cafe near where i live is crammed with students studying/IMing or whatever from their wi-fi laptops.

kinkos is the logical next step - knowing you can access anything from your home/business network if you needed to in case you forgot something. what's next? a few more key exclusives, and then a key roaming partner.

openness and roaming will come. tmo knows they have to roam, but right now the costs of customer service i'm guessing would way outweigh any roaming revenues...and if their customers had bad experiences roaming on other wi-fi networks, who would they blame? most customers don't understand the network infrastructure of roaming! they'd blame tmo and change to to another provider. it's a war for subs, and tmo is playing it smart here. pete thompson wants more subs on his network, not fewer, but he certainly doesn't want to lose anyone yet. everyone knows cross-carrier services are good for everyone - but you have to look at it at a point in time: right now.

as an aside, tmo's GSM/GPRS network is perhaps the most open of any of the big six national carriers. they allow messaging and roaming capabilities that none the others allow and even purposefully block. in my experience, it is far easier to develop an enterprise app using t-mobile than any of the others right now - so it's hard to attack them for running a closed network; i think it's just the contrary.

tmo's voice network...yeah, they got some work to do there.