Using public Wi-Fi can be something of a frustrating experience - if you can locate a connection at all, then speed and reliability can be a problem and if you don’t get it free with your broadband contract then the only other real option is to pay. Virgin and O2 plan to give us much more choice, and are moving into the free public Wi-Fi market in a serious way, but what’s on offer now and can we really expect to see a decent national free Wi-Fi network any time soon?

At the moment, the free Wi-Fi market is pretty hit and miss and access largely depends on where you happen to be. The further you move from major population centres, the narrower the options become, and even access to the established service providers is hardly what you would call ‘plug and play’ for everyone.

BT Openzone is the biggest provider and has a very large network which is free if you are already a BT broadband customer. BSkyB offers similar free Wi-Fi access to their own broadband customers viaThe Cloud, whom they boughtfor £50 million in January. If you happen to be in a Little Chef, a Nintendo 3DS user, in the Square Mile of London or one of 200 pubs in London now offering free connectivity, you’re also in luck. But that kind of illustrates the point - free Wi-Fi access is a really mixed bag.

Beyond that, there are a myriad of localised Wi-Fi services to befoundin pubs, restaurants, and in public buildings such as libraries, but the only real answer is to use a website or app to scan for the Wi-Fi services in your immediate area.

So, what of the new players? O2 are building their ownfree Wi-Fi network, and are planning to have 14,000 ‘O2 Wi-Fi’ hotspots in place by 2013, replacing the 450 it currently offers via The Cloud. Their hotspots will be located in retail outlets and outdoor areas, with connections of up to 24Mbps, limited by a monthly 10GB fair usage policy.  It’s going to be worth keeping an eye out for hotspot locations as the service rolls out, because if we get performance approaching that level, O2 will generate huge interest.

Virgin Media’s plans are to provide free connectivity to all users in London at a speed of 0.5MB - crawling along while subscribers to their broadband packages get a connection of up to 10MB. When you are used to much quicker access at home or in the office, half a meg is likely to become quite frustrating quite quickly. However, for basic email and web access, it’s going to deliver a valuable service to a great many people.

Or . . . you could pay for Wi-Fi access

If you can’t find a suitable connection, or want to me more certain of decent speed and availability, the only alternative is to pay. A quick 90 minute BT Openzone burst currently costs £5.99 or you can bulk buy 4000 minutes for £39.00. Monthly subscriptions start at £5 for 500 minutes but that means you also have to agree to a 12 month deal, or you can go completely Pay As You Go for 15p per minute, which BT stresses is for the ‘occasional user’.

If you want to go the mobile broadband route, not only have you got to size up pay-as-you-go or contract charges, but also keep a close eye on your data usage. Given that over the course of a month, 1GB of mobile broadband data will provide roughly 40 minutes of daily browsing, 40 sent & received emails per day, 8 music downloads and just 15 minutes of video downloads, it really is a case of fitting your habits around the service you choose andcomparingthe deals on offer.

When the Virgin and O2 networks arrive, we’ll certainly have more choice and it appears that the plans of O2 in particular will put BT and BSkyB under serious pressure to take their own services to the next level.
 

Author Karl Doody is managing director of 27stars, a web, iPhone and iPad development specialist.  www.27stars.co.uk