Gossip

Sniffer is cut off: Europe isolated...

In Stockholm, the local authority has put fibre under every street. Domestic users have 100 megabit broadband services, for the same prices that British users pay for ADSL/cable. So what sort of Internet provision does Stockholm's prestigious conference centre offer Jeff Pulver for his VON Europe conference?

On the face of it, Pulver has got it all right. The conference hall is fully "unwired" - WiFi via a Strix mesh network. Not only that, but there are electric mains sockets at every second row of seats: no battery starvation here.

But your Sniffer gathers that the audience is, nonetheless, ungrateful: instead of getting a Skype call, an anguished GSM phone call emerges from the temporary headquarters of Voice over IP.

It is The Boss, who cannot get onto the Web. And the answer to the question of what the convention centre can offer, he says, is:

Ten megabits. "That's all they can give me," moaned Pulver.com's tech guru, John Jones. "All my board shows me that the nodes are fine, but connectivity back to the Internet is intermittent - when you get all these people hitting the server..."

Jones shrugged eloquently, and it's hard not to sympathise. Except: actually, the problem for the first two hours of the conference hasn't been backhaul: it's the failure of the local LAN to issue working IP addresses.

"No, no, you have great connectivity," insisted Jones. "All the indicators on my board show that it's working fine."

But on the conference floor the magic spell "IPCONFIG" tells us: "Autoconfiguration IP address..." In other words, the machine can't find a DHCP server, and there's no DNS, no gateway. Wireless signal? Perfect! Value? Zero.

Is it really the case these days that end-users can do better than professional communications infrastructure providers? Your Sniffer wrote this message at 10 AM (London time). Wonder how long it will take for it to reach the NewsWireless server... half an hour?