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Trouble in the virtual Internet

When the Boss started his column on eWEEK.com he was asked what made him excited about wireless. "My ambition is to be omnipresent on the Internet," he said, incautiously.

Nobody has ever quite worked out what he meant, but Sniffer has extracted the following explanation from him, stuck as he is in the mountains of Southern Spain: "Ah, good grief, how I wish I hadn't said that."

It is, of course, raining (he says) in Andalucia - in the hills of the Alpujarras, where it just never rains - and his plan was to install rural broadband for himself and his neighbours in a small village called Tijola. The rain has meant nobody has even bothered to ring to say "we aren't coming."

His cellular GPRS link is out of range. Actually, both his cellular data links are out of wireless range.

The nearest Internet access is a relative in the same village. They have DSL, but they are about one kilometer outside the acceptable range - so when it rains, or the wind blows, or there is a sun storm, or even if the DSLAM (access module) gets a bit warm, or a bit cold - the connection dies.

Not that it helps that much (he says) because it comes into the house on a USB-connected DSL modem, which works like a dialup modem - every time you log on, you have to enter your password. His relative doesn't know the password, so he can't connect his own PC to it. So he's using a 30K dialup pay-as-you-go Wanadoo modem link. The local PC is a Windows 98 machine, version A - so it won't recognise his USB memory stick. And it has a Spanish keyboard.

We're trying to feel sorry for him, honestly. We may even make it ...