Feature at Macworld on the best choices for iPhone-Fi: I wrote this feature for Macworld as a rundown of the best ways to find (and possibly pay for) Wi-Fi for an iPhone. Because the iPhone has a full-fledged browser, you’ll be able to connect to locations that have gateway pages for terms of service acceptance, login, or payment. This includes Boingo, it turns out.Yesterday, the firm wrote me to correct a misunderstanding. While Boingo uses a software client to allow automatic logins to their aggregated network’s partner locations, the software client isn’t a strict requirement. …

Apple CEO scrounges Wi-Fi on street corners: Steve Jobs tells the Wall Street Journal: “Most of us have Wi-Fi networks around us most of the time at home and at work. There’s often times a Wi-Fi network that you can join whether you’re sitting in a coffee shop or even walking along the street piggybacking on somebody’s home Wi-Fi network.” Okay, now I get it. He and AT&T CEO Randall L. Stephenson, also interviewed in the same article, just don’t get Wi-Fi. They get cell networks.What’s wrong with Jobs’s statement? First, Wi-Fi at a corporation …

I figured it out: it’s an internal business unit problem at the phone giant: There must no integration between AT&T’s wireline businesses, which sell DSL, phone lines, and Wi-Fi, and the former Cingular as regards Wi-Fi. That would explain the lack of a Wi-Fi data plan alongside the cell data offering for the iPhone.Cingular always had (and still offers) a crummy Wi-Fi plan compared to two-buck AT&T WiFi (formerly SBC FreedomLink). Prices were much higher and locations fewer. Cingular was 60 percent owned by SBC-cum-AT&T for the longest time, and the AT&T-SBC merger …

The statewide network planned for Rhode Island didn’t receive the loan needed to get efforts started: The General Assembly did not approve a $28.5m loan needed by the Economic Development Corporation to build the project out. This was a loan guarantee, but the state would be on the hook. The EDC is looking at other options, as well as working with the assembly to jigger the deal. It’s possible private firms might help finance the project, or that a nonprofit could be formed to work on financing separately from the …

I guess I was a day or two prescient with my comment that Wayport and iBahn had stalled on the scale of their hotel networks: On Monday, I wrote about Wayport, after they announced a Yahoo portal deal on advertising and content, and noted that they and other firms that were founded to bring Internet service (often first wireline then Wi-Fi later) into hotels had reached something close to saturation on the number of properties they could provide service to. The only way to increase revenue is to have more usage or to add more services. And, lo, Wayport and iBahn have now separately announced their …