A new movement is afoot, organizing and supporting many hotspots and aggregrating them into big swarms of distributed connectivity. In the US, Boingo is the leading example:

[O]ne of the biggest aggregators with more than 100,000 hotspots, [Boingo] is introducing on Monday what it says is the first worldwide flat-rate plan for Wi-Fi hotspots. For a monthly fee of ‚Ǩ29, or $39, subscribers can use any of the company’s affiliated hotspots for as long as they want.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)