[DaveRo]

I have just come back from sailing down the west coast if Italy. I was using an XP laptop connected via Bluetooth to a Nokia 6310i phone to Wind GPRS - principally to get weather forecasts via the web, email, and download weather data. I was subscribed to MEGA 15000.

My experience was that this sometimes worked well, and sometimes not at all - depending on where I was and the time of day. In particular I had two problems:

1 It often took many many attempts to get a PPP dial-up connection. For example, in Vibo Marina (a small but not tiny town in Calabria) it often took 20 or 30 attempts which got stuck on 'dialling' before getting a connection. In other places (often 5 miles out at sea!) I would get a connection first time.

2 Once connected, I found that if data stopped flowing, the connection would die. It would continue sending but receive nothing back and I have to disconnect and reconnect it - leading to problem 1. I found that I had to keep loading webpages in the background while I read email and replied otherwise I would lose the connection.

My question: is this normal? Is it just that Wind's GPRS network has little capacity in these remote places and is unreliable - or do people think there's something wrong with my equipment or configuration? I commonly found that I could get a good connection early in the morning but that once I lost it I could not get another one for some time. Do Wind operate some sort of rationing?

I'm be in Sicily next, so I'd like to fix this if I can - or at least understand why it's happening.

Dave