So I turn up at a Starbucks, laptop in hand. I need to find a internet connection, and get my story back to Guardian Towers, pronto.

And, raptures, I've seen the sticker on the window that indicates there's a wireless internet hotspot inside. I've got a wireless card in my iBook: those precious high-speed wireless internet waves are already radiating through my flesh as I stand there dumbly trying to decide between grande or tall, skinny or full fat.

Having got the ordeal of ordering the coffee out the way, I ask the server about signing up to the wireless internet connection.

You know, the Wi-Fi. Internet?

I get a blank look in return. I might as well have asked him to explain the theory of relativity, or to show me the way to the cheap sandwiches.

"The what? Do we have that?" he asks after a while, looking to colleagues for a little help with the crank. A vague discussion ensues, as a queue forms, where the mysterious Wi-Fi assumes the cloudy outline of a masked bank robber described three days after the heist, by people who were standing 200 yards away at the time. At night.

There isn't even a leaflet nearby to explain. Just that sticker on the window.

Eventually, being British, I apologise for asking, shuffle off with coffee in hand, and take a seat at the back of the shop. Flipping open my laptop, I can see a strong, nine out of 10 Wi-Fi signal coming from somewhere, but I'll be damned if I can log in. After a few minutes of head-banging despair, I shuffle off, coffee in hand, to blag a few minutes in a nearby hotel's business centre.

For the record, all this isn't happening in some Starbucks outpost in rural Little Folly-on-Dean. I'm in San Francisco: epicentre of the dotcom boom. Less than an hour's drive to the south is Silicon Valley. But it counts for nothing, it seems.

Is it, I wonder, inevitable that as soon as big business gets involved with WiFi, things get more difficult? Until recently, after all, if you wanted some wireless internet action, you looked up a bare bones web page somewhere and got the coordinates of some Wi-Fi enthusiast who had opened his network up for public access. You might end up balanced on a wall outside someone's home, hoping not to get arrested as a peeping tom while you got your net fix, but the technical bit - actually getting online - was pretty simple.

But for really widespread adoption, the involvement of business - the big telecoms companies, mainly - was inevitable. They build big networks, they want some money. And the moment you have to pay for anything, of course, it all gets trickier. Then you need to start saying who you are, prove you are who you say you are, and they need to know who you say you are, and that you are who you say you are.

It is, as you can see, frightfully complex.

And now, as the networks roll out, there are a few ways this could go. We could end up with an old-fashioned monopoly situation, where one provider dominates commercial Wi-Fi. At the moment, BT seems to be leading things in the UK, especially since last week's announcement that it is rolling out a further 120 hotspots in airports, hotels and motorway service stations across the UK.

That's bad news for prices, which we really want driven down by competition, as happened in the mobile phone business. But it's great news for simplicity, especially as BT is working out roaming agreements with foreign WiFi networks. We just all sign up for BT and that's that.

But not so fast. No matter how groundbreaking BT is, it's unlikely to have it it's own way for long. For instance, we can certainly expect T-Mobile to roll out further Starbucks hotspots, baffling baristas from Banff to Bristol.

And new technology could open the door to some start-ups (remember that word?) as well. There are a number of new WiFi systems coming on to the market in the next few months which would make it easy to create a Wi-Fi network that reached out over miles, rather than the current few hundred yards.

At that point, enterprising cybercafe owners might sniff a little more than their appalling coffee: the smell of money. They could become broadband providers for their entire neighbourhood by hooking up their big leased lines to a Wi-Fi box and antennae. That's particularly appealing if BT or the cable companies haven't managed to kit the locality out with fixed-line broadband.

It's all, of course, terrible news for those of us who like it - need it - simple. For instance, how do you find a hotspot? At the moment, the list of BT's hotspots is short enough to memorise - Costa coffee shops, the lobbies of particular chain hotels, a few airport terminals. But as commercial Wi-Fi takes off, locating a hotspot from a network you belong to could become quite a challenge.

And will we have to continue signing up in advance of sitting down with our coffee to log on? Couldn't they start selling scratch cards, alongside the lattes and muffins, with an access code to let us surf awhile on impulse?

There would be drawbacks, of course. Not least, they'd have to start telling the coffee bar staff what's going on. But then things just wouldn't be the same, would they?