I Don’t Get It…
A favorite place of mine to hang out is the Shell Magallanes station, because it has free Wi-Fi. I buy a drink or two at Select (so at least I can claim I’m patronizing the establishment), find a table, then proceed to surf for free. And one time, stopping by from an all-night poker game on the way home, I was able to download a 200MB file in 10 mins! 
Unfortunately, there are some problems with the network. A few days ago, I was unable to connect to the network. So I resorted to manually assigning an IP and DNS addresses to my connection, and tried again. It worked! Happy ending right?
Well just now, I tried connecting to the same network. Didn’t want to connect again, so I assigned the addresses, and it still didn’t work. I did the last resort workaround: restarted my computer. And after that, it worked.
Huh?
Well, its free service and the owner can often opt not to continue offering their bandwidth for free. Want free wi-fi? Try the Starbucks at the ground floor of WalterMart (corner of Pasay Road and Pasong Tamo). I’ve been mooching their bandwidth for a week while waiting for my training to start. There’s an AP named FREE_INTERNET and as it says, bandwidth is free and relatively fast. One time the FREE_INTERNET AP was on and off so I tried connecting to the Globe WIZ AP and WIZ allowed me to access the ‘net for free!
Well, since WIZ is a paid service, your mileage may vary.