I'm a reformed club member...I no longer drop the cash for RCC/AC memberships. Instead, I'm a T-Mobile all-I-can-eat member. When I needed a second cell phone in a different geography last year, I chose T-Mobile for two reasons--a cool data-enabled handset (Sidekick...I'm not a huge fan of the Blackberry form factor) and the WiFi add-on capabilities. As a T-Mobile subscriber, I pay an extra $20/month, and get all the WiFi I can eat--and lemme tell ya, I eat as much as I can, some months well over 100 hours.

I was previously a pay-as-you-go member, back in the gold old days when $50 bought 5 hours of use, with a minimum decrement of only 5 or 10 minutes. Now, it's a *one hour* minimum, which is total garbage--a total disincentive for anyone to use pay-as-you-go, as you're now back to the same $10/hour you'd be paying on a daily basis in the clubs.

So, I'd make a couple of recommendations...

First, look at a monthly plan with T-Mobile. Stand-alone monthlies were $39.99 last time I looked, $29.99 if paid in advance for a year, and $19.99 if linked to any other T-Mobile service plan. Once you have all-you-can-eat, you have absolutely no qualms about firing up anytime, anywhere. Other carriers are out there (most notably Boingo), but T-Mobile has the coverage of most interest to the business traveler; they've also just inked a deal with Hyatt, too.

Second, buy a WiFi card with an external antenna--I sit outside RCC/AC/PC and hop on their wireless. An external card will provide much better antenna gain than the built-in WiFi capabilities of pretty much any laptop. I prefer the cards from Buffalo (http://www.buffalotech.com), as they use a very popular chipset, as well as have a connector for an external antenna (Buffalo makes two, an omni and a patch, both of which I'd highly recommend) which will further improve gain. I've been using the Buffalo stuff for about two years; prior to their introduction here in the States, I bought their stuff in Tokyo. They're also really rugged--I never remove the card from my laptop before I throw it in my bag, and to date (jinx forthcoming, I'm sure) I've never had a problem.

Also, don't buy an external USB WiFi adapter. While cute, their coverage is awful.

Finally, whenever connecting via a public wireless access point, always fire up a VPN connection to your firm's network (if possible). While enterprise security solutions for WiFi have come a long way in the past few years, security for hotspots is still lacking; my company has solved the former issue, and is looking to address this issue for the latter for the military, among others. Stay tuned!

If you can get your company to buy off on the club memberships, that's awesome. Even though I can, I can't personally justify it--if I take a really long delay somewhere, I'm more than content to drop $50 on a day pass. Over the last two years, I've only needed to do that twice, so I feel like I'm ahead of the game, even though I'm playing with company money, not my own.