Very true! I travelled through France this summer by Couchsurfing! What a superb website. Shame I didn't own an N8xx at the time! All the wonderful people I stayed with used wifi routers in the house and were always very obliging in letting we weary travellers use it...

People are greedy all over the world, so Fon thought about that: there is a limit to the amount of bandwidth left to the customers.

Man you guys are lucky!

Here in Portugal only about 1/20 of the wifi is free or shared, the rest as been devoured by PT which charges you for using any wifi even cofee shops!

the only good thing is that if you have dsl already, for an extra 5 euros you can get the access. which is avaiable about everywhere.
every public phone acts as a router(wierd right?) they spent all that monay to put a router in just about every public phone...

but the cool thing is, if you use a laptop, for about 39 euros/month you can get "allover" wireless with download speeds up to 7mb/s!

In Belgium, I just go sit near a McDonalds...

So in the UK, MacDonalds do free wifi (for Nintendo DS customers isn't it?),
Starbucks are rolling out free wifi (starting in London & Birmingham): http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communicatio...2129099,00.htm

I know they use T-Mobile, but the news item does specifically say free: "will allow customers to surf the Web, check email and download files at high speed for free, as long as they have an 802.11b-compatible laptop or PDA."

Then there are, as with other places, various coffee/snack bars that do free wifi.

I had a quick look with this website, which showed some sites: http://www.hotspot-locations.com/ are there better versions?

The big issue is, as was previously mentioned, that you need a list of these sites before you go, and I always forget.

Seems like this could be a good Maemo-mapper POI integration project - go to a website, put in the location and download a POI file of free wifi/T-mobile/whatever provider you have hotspots.

In Germany, both McDonalds and Starbucks have you pay for wifi.

Yeah, well -- you lost the war...

It really doesn't make sense to have pay-wi-fi in coffee shops, as I mentioned earlier.. if I'm looking for a place with wi-fi I avoid those with pay-wi-fi and go to those with free wi-fi, even if the coffee I buy is more expensive than the wi-fi was in that other place.. and I think I'm not alone in this way of reasoning.

EDIT: And oh, another thing: With free wi-fi you know what you get: Connect and try. With pay wi-fi you don't. Like in that T-Mobile hotel I checked into. Paid the money, only to find that a) I couldn't have the laptop and the N800 on at the same time, and b) The network didn't allow me to sync my email over ssl imap. Apparently T-Mobile, in that place at least, limited the connection to what they figured it should be: http, https and ftp basically. Well, I'm guessing about the ftp because I didn't use it. But getting my mail didn't work.

On behalf of Boingo...

Effective November 12, Boingo released a connection manager for N800s and N810s. For N800s, it requires an update to the latest OS build. With the Boingo Mobile software for Nokia Internet Tablets, users can sign up for a Boingo Mobile account that provides unlimited access worldwide for $7.95 a month.

MORE INFO: http://mobile.boingo.com/nokia/

Too expensive. Now where was that WEP cracking thread?