Free Wi-Fi for iPhone in Japan

How do you feel to hear iPhone contacted user can use 3,500 Wi-Fi hot spots provided by carrier without payment? It's true and I love to use it at McDonald's with charging iPhone with build in AC plug to table.

Wi-Fi network's SSID and WEP key is solved at Softbank service site in MyYahoo. In order to logging account id and password is same as mailing account for Softbank mail service(@i.softbank.jp).

Following step is the way to get SSID WEP key.

Preparing SSID, WEP, id and password, you can connect high speed Wi-Fi network at hotspot. After you've logged in with cookie available Safari, other hotspot's authorized page will automatically make you log in without entering id and password.

As everything has doodle side, this service has large mistaken architecture to authenticationauthorization.

Softbank, authorized iPhone carrier, is not largest cellphone carrier in Japan and their infrastructure of 3G network is not so enough to give away to be used as Internet pipeline for iPhone the huge bytes eater users.

Softbank MobileC.T.O responsible infrastructure said they are afraid of millions iPhone user start to use 3G network in order to access YouTube. Jun-ichi Miyagawa interview (japanese)

In this situation, one of Softbank Mobile's answer was that free Wi-Fi spot for iPhone users. Now they started to cooperation with FON. I feel good about their going to expand Wi-Fi in Japan in these way.

My mention is their tech feeling or geek soul. Free Wi-Fi service has large architecture miss and decrease user experience.

At last 4th Nov the day free Wi-Fi "Automatically" logging in service, I went McDonald's with bad prediction. "Logging in" does not suites Wi-Fi connection. And some person went press party said "Softbank seems to use COOKIE for automatically logging-in". Cookie and "Log in" makes me pessimistic.

I've tried how it works and found automatically logging in worked correctly in word meaning, COOKIE rumor was correct. All processes worked on Safari. This means it's necessary to launch Safari in mobilepoint Wi-Fi area. When I was passing through Wi-Fi network without launching Safari, iPhone will be captured into Wi-Fi without logging in and all applications can't connect Internet. It's very frustrated situation.

Softbank may know all iPhone's MAC address which imported into Japan. Why they not register these MAC address band to their Wi-Fi router....

Additional note

This Y! icon is installed at Softbank shop at early days of iPhone launching. Now softbank does not install this icon on new iPhone.

Go to http://ipn.yahoo.co.jp and find setup.