It works fine for me. At the local mall, there is free wifi from the mall and the Apple store. There are also another 10 or so signals from the various establishments. I can lock on just fine to the mall signal or the Apple signal.

At work, we pwd protected access for guests. I can log onto that as well.

Is it possible you are locking on to networks that don't actually allow outside access? My 770 typically finds a lot of unlocked networks, but only a very few of them actually allow outside access.