It seems that vending machines from the Asahi drinks company may soon be offering free Wi-Fi connectivity to people in Japan. It won’t even be necessary to buy a drink from the machine – the service will be funded by advertisements on the landing page when you first log on.

If you’re travelling to Japan and want to avoid huge data roaming costs, this could be an excellent way to stay connected.

There should be about 1000 machines brought online during 2012, and many thousands more over the next five years.

Article in Japanese
Machine Translation