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If somebody can do it cheaper then it's better for consumers.
But competing against free? Just same as paid OS versus free OS.
Your laptop's free OS is also good even you get some trial(crap)ware what you should pay later.
WIth free internet you could get some ads. Or would you pay to get it ad-free?

Here is one good example from Nordic country where University, City and local companies can make it free for all http://www.panoulu.net/

I thought open WiFi was illegal in the EU?

Certainly not. There are several cities in EU with city-wide open WiFi, including Oulu in Finland (http://www.panoulu.net/).

Slovenian capitol city Ljubljana already has a grid of free WLAN hotpoints for everyone.

So does the Finnish town Oulu with its PanOulu network (since 2003 if memory serves). Somewhat unusually it is a joint operation of the university, the city and some private enterprises, who've found participation makes financial sense even though they can't charge users for it or even force advertisement banners on them.

naturally municipal WiFi/WiMax deployment would be handled by the municipal government.

You mean something like: http://www.panoulu.net/?

They (or us) just upgraded to MobileWiMAX.

I think the size of the cities also has an effect. For example here in Oulu, Finland, the panoulu network works extremely well and covers most of the city center and all of the university. On the other hand there are only around 125000 citizens. But maybe something to take a look at, many of the people behind panoulu are constantly zooming around the world at various conferences.

Not sure if Opera uses the same settings thingy as Metroid Prime Hunters does for Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, but if it does, that thing only seems to have MAC/NWiFiC ID transfer to another DS system, and no hand-tuning of the MAC. (Probably just to make cheating and identity spoofing a bit trickier...)

Like others said, it's probably infinitely easier to just route the access through a laptop. =/

And, of course, remember to raise a question why your city doesn't have an open WLAN yet. Mine does. =) (Too bad it won't extend to my apartment yet...)

This is the wireless state of Oulu a city of Finland: http://joker.iki.fi/cms/?q=node/view/135&PHPSESSID =80c78af4c4b6589901e695a40bf23ec0 http://www.panoulu.net/ Right now PanOulu is free for university students and personnel. Can you believe it? FREE as in BEER!