BT have been in town promoting their new wi-fi coverage for the city. Pretty much all of the city center is covered, plus areas of digbeth, it sounds great apart from the cost. Pay as you will cost you as much as £6 an hour, with equally silly subscription options like £10 a month for 250 minutes or £25 a month for 4000.

4000 minutes might seem quite reasonable, but let’s say I’m using this 5 days a week 9 - 5 (normal working hours) I’d need something closer to 9600 minutes.

I don’t know who BT thinks it’s market is for these packages, clearly you don’t have enough minutes for proper business use, and if your paying an-average of £25 quid a month for home broadband your not likely to go paying that again to get get wiffy in the park? There will be cases of light business users for big businesses, e.g. checking email at lunch or during meeting. But there’s no way the package match up to a proper wi-fi service.

The Cloud will also do you unlimited* access for £6.99 (one device) or £9.99 for a multiple, apparently this is done via MAC address so you don’t even need to sign in every time you connect to the hot spot.

However *unlimited is actually limited to 40mb per hour or 1GB per month. Even an hours worth of facebooking your likely to come up close to the 40mb per hour, 1GB a month is also pretty restrictive.

So, OpenZone is too pricey and the Cloud’s terms are pretty stupid, I want to use wiffy on the move and I’m prepared to pay a little to get it, but both of these packages aren’t going to be much use to anyone other than a light business user.

That’s where BT and the Cloud are going to fail, these packages aren’t good enough for business, but are too expensive for home customers. Google, please hurry up and bring your ad-supported free wifi over here please, everyone else is ripping us off.