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IMS in Venice: phone home? No chance!

Phone home? I wish I could! - A group of us are here in Venice for a seminar on IMS, sponsored by HP - which sells infrastructure gear to phone networks. And so you can imagine, before flying out we all checked out the hotel we're in, to make sure of connectivity. It said: "Wireless Internet in all rooms" - Ha!

This is a genuine Novotel. Motorways on two sides. Swimming pool locked shut. Breakfast mostly eaten when I got there: soggy bacon and dreggs  (dreggs are those sad remains of what might have been scrambled eggs, or perhaps dirty tea-towel fragments). Tea urn had half a cup full of tepid water. There was no fruit left in the buffet.  Yup. That's a Novotel.

And where's the wireless Internet in the rooms? Answer: in the bar in reception. The socket in the room is a modem socket. You know, analogue dialup, for anybody who knows a local ISP dialup number, and has an iPass account...

So it's time to pull out the trusty Nokia N90 and see what GPRS data can do. And guess what...?

These phone networks talk about how much money they're going to make from mobile data. I wonder if they ever try it, themselves, to see if it actually works?

So this bulletin comes to you from an Ethernet cable I found in the bar...

  Tags: GPRS