The final answer to a free internet using a HotSpot comes from a nice application called Toonel.

Toonel is a free encapsulation service provided for mobile devices (PDAs, mobile phones, etc). Some time ago, I used it for getting my email by GPRS, paying the ridiculously high prices of this kind of service. Toonel creates a tunnel between your machine and their servers, and they kindly compress all your traffic in order to reduce your final bill. Nice stuff.

The answer comes when you realize that, as it encapsulates all the traffic, there are no connections to ports 80 or 25. Instead, everything goes to a non privileged port in the toonel.net domain, and the filtering system downstairs leaves this traffic through as they don’t know if it is a Skype connection.

In conclusion, I have free web access thatnks to this nice app. I’m probably the user that generates more traffic in their servers, but I don’t care as long as they don’t kick me. Although I still have some problems with email and other services, it’s not bad for a free internet connection…