Verizon has a new WiFi hotspot program where any of its "Mobile Broadband" customers get free access to hotspots across the country. The advantage is for the same price you were paying yesterday, you can now transfer more data without worrying about the typical 5GB per month limit since none of the hotspot transfers count against your monthly limit. The bad news is, being a Verizon smartphone owner doesn't get you any of these benefits.Fierce Wireless has the press release from Verizon. For this to work, you need a monthly Mobile Broadband plan and one of the approved devices associated with that plan, like a USB dongle, the MiFi, a PC Card or a netbook you've purchased through Verizon. To access the service requires a series of steps:

• Get a PC running Windows 2000, XP, Vista or 7. The next steps will not work with the Mac, Linux or anything else.
• Open VZAccess Manager on your PC. This step would cause me problems right off the bat. After the guy that sold me my MiFi back in July had his VZAccess Manager crash numerous times on his laptop, one of which required a reboot to get it to connect again. I avoided installing it on my machine. I had him activate the MiFi for me. I am sure that was an isolated incident, but I am a software minimalist and never understood the need to install any software to access a WiFi router, which is what the MiFi is. In six months I've not missed it one bit and certainly don't need that thing running in the background all of the time advertising its presence in my system tray.
• Fire up the WiFi radio on your PC.
• In the VZAccess Manager, select Verizon Wi-Fi Access under Available Network. You'll need version 7.2 or higher of the VZAccess Manager for this to work.

Once those steps are done, you should be online and none of your transfers count against your monthly plan limit. For all of the devices listed above though, owning a Verizon smartphone and the related data plan gets you nothing, even though it is very likely you paid more for the phone and the data plan than you would with one of the USB or PC Card devices. I presume the main reason is because the VZAccess Manager won't run on a smartphone, but really, that is no excuse. Hopefully Verizon is working on some sort of user account and password access, much like many other WiFi hotspots use - AT&T and T-Mobile for example. I'd use that service. Until then, I'll just stick with my MiFi data limits, or head to a Starbucks.