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3GSM - how to set up a large WLAN - not!

It is going to be a complaint from many at this year´s Barcelona thrash - that people could not get online wirelessly. Is it a plot by the GSM association to make 3G broadband look good?

Last year´s congress was remarkable for cramped press facilities. OK, not as cramped as the facilities we used to have in Cannes, but nonetheless, cramped - and given how much bigger Barcelona Fira grounds are, we expected better this year.

No such luck, sadly. Exactly the same number of seats for nearly twice the number of registered Press.

But worse was the attempt to provide Internet access. If you could get one of the available desks in the press centre, you could plug into one of the available Ethernet cables (again, not enough!) but if not, you had to log into the wireless LAN.

That worked, if ´worked´ is a variable with a very small range of very low numbers. Web pages took several minutes to load, and usually timed out. Any attempt to get into content management software, was doomed.

Being resourceful, stringers resorted to Google. Google´s Gmail service is unusual in Web mail services in being fail-safe, and quite ´thin´ on the user machine. That means: it saves what you write as a draft, and it loads quickly.

If, as seems inevitable here, you get disconnected half way through writing your story, you can be pretty sure that most of what you already wrote will be still there when you manage to log in again.