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Voice over wireless LAN. How come even the experts couldn't make it work?

Yes, I went to VON Europe. It was a success, with good presentations by senior telco execs to other senior telco execs - and it covered Voice Over WiFi. Except that voice over WiFi was not working there.

It just so happened that before the show opened, I was on an assignment to test voice-over-IP (VOIP) telephony. So, I was pretty glad of the expertise I'd find at the event.

As I described in my eWeek column, I was disappointed. I'd set up the newest system, Gossiptel, and it kept failing.

"The technology for doing VOIP is established, pretty stable and in use. According to Sonus, roughly 10 percent of the world's wired phone networks are switched by IP switches—and a lot of those are owned by Sonus, of course," says the column.

It concludes: "For one guy working away in a Starbucks, or better still in his hotel room, or for one gal logged on to a hot spot in a train station, it is possible to overlook the awful latency built into some access points. But for a horde of eager business callers, anxious to get through to someone, it's just a joke."

Except I needed to get through, and I wasn't laughing.