@ CTIA: Not Connecting At CTIA

It’s become a ritual: thousand of people gather in one place to exhort the glories of communications in this glorious wireless age — and damn little works as planned. Today, the CTIA WiFi, which already was slow and glitchy yesterday, has been overwhelmed since before the keynotes ended and the show officially opened. My Sierra Wireless card from Cingular works well in some.spots, like the one I’m in now, but not in others. I spent a large chunk of time cloistered in the press room so I could use ethernet. During that time, my PDA with voice capabilities — aka Cingular 8125 — showed full bars while I was sitting there but dumped all of my calls into voice mail. My phone hasn’t rung in hours, which I can assure you is an anomaly when all the bars come out to play. (To those who think I dropped off the face of the earth: try text messaging.) Then again, sitting in a meeting room yesterday I completely lost service and had to borrow a Verizon phone.
I wish I were alone. The cries of “the wifi is down” were ringing throughout the press room and elsewhere. Some cell phones are taking much longer than usual to connect. I heard one person wondering if Skype was being blocked because he had so many problems; I could get through on chat easily (when online) but never tried a call. I asked a press room tech assistant about it and he didn’t know what Skype is.
Before the show, I was assured we would have connectivity like never before. Unfortunately, so far, it’s all too familiar.
Update: Just got back from a swing on the show floor. I actually sat for nearly 15 minutes in the eensy-teensy Cingular booth alternately being frustrated by the lack of Cingular 3g broadband connectivity and the lack of Edge access on my 8125 until someone mentioned that the booth was made of material that was adding to the connection problem — and that they were having trouble getting their own calls. (I could not make this stuff up.) Meanwhile, I’ve been getting Gmail server error messages for hours no matter the connection or the device. I have a Verizon demo LG Mobile TV phone now — that was working on the floor as a TV. Don’t know yet about the phone.

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