In my experience WiFi Hotspots just don't work.
I work in Central Birmingham and all of your general cloud providers like 'The Cloud' and 'BT Openzone' are there but you will be lucky if you get a connection. I get free Openzone access because I have BT at home.
1) You can be 'connected' to the hotspot but subsequently get no IP address leaving you with a 169.X unroutable dud.
2) You connect and get an IP address but the re-direction to the HTTP landing page doesn't kick in.
3) If you're lucky to get this far you might actually get online. Usually you're required to click through at least two more pages, one of them being a EULA and you might have to sign up if you're a new user.
4) Now you're online! On the BT Openzone hotspot I used today my connection dropped out completely roughly once every 30 minutes (with a 4/5 bar connection) and I had to disconnect and go through the whole process again. If I moved 10m away the connection went down to 1 bar and was unusable.
The most reliable connections tend to be dedicated ones in Coffee Shops.