Boingo has quickly become my preferred Wifi service

I’ve heard quite a lot about Boing Wireless, the hotspot service provider. I’ve written about them before, I’ve signed-up to use them now and again and, if memory serves, they knocked me (and an array of other mobile bloggers) a 10-hour free trial for the duration of Mobile World Congress, an action that I thought very, very smart at the time.

My problem is that I spent most of Mobile World Congress this year being professionally stressed-to-hell so I never got a chance to use Boingo.

I now frequently find myself in wifi areas for extended periods of time. For example today I was in San Francisco Airport for about 3 hours then (for the connecting flight) Los Angeles Airport for about 5 hours. They’re covered by T-Mobile’s hotspot service. I’ve signed up for that, but the helpful (i.e. not at all) T-Mobile USA billing system negated to send me my username and password.

So a few weeks ago I paid — I dunno — a tenner or something stupid for 24 hours access to the T-Mobile hotspot in San Francisco Airport.

Then I got home, hunted for Boingo and signed-up with an account.

$9.95 a month buys you access to 100,000 hotspots. Done. Your login details work on anything that has WiFi capabilities. So I took the liberty of downloading Boingo’s clients for my T-Mobile G1 and my iPhone 3G — and of course the desktop client for my Apple.

The Boingo client is brilliant. It simply runs in the background and the moment it detects a compatible network, the window pops up and it logs you in. There’s no need to visit a sodding webpage, select ‘boingo’ and type in your username and password details. The client does it all for you.

The mobile clients work beautifully too. There’s nothing worse than having to fiddle about with your mobile device browser trying to initiate a connection.

If you travel a lot, have a look at Boingo. I’ve been thoroughly, thoroughly enjoying using it.

Boingo are giving away five year-long accounts on their Facebook page if you give them a good enough reason as to why you deserve one. More details on their Twitter feed.