I know that they are free public APs, and that I can see other people connecting to them just fine using their laptops and iPhones. Also, I've connected to at least two of them before; but it's been a while.

It doesn't sound likely that all five public APs that I've run across have the same problem.

If I make a trip to one of these I know I've connected to before and confirm that I can connect to it with my laptop, what does that tell me? That the NIT is broke, right? It just seems like a bit of trouble to go through when I can see other people using the AP on their devices.

I'm guessing there are no diagnostic logs or no way to turn on anything diagnostic?

is there anyway to connect to a network from the command line? Maybe I can see some stdio output.