[DaveRo]

Thanks for those anecdotes.

I don't think it's a signal-strength problem. I've been on islands where I've been within sight of the only mobile mast and can't connect, and I've been offshore with 1 bar of signal and it's worked fine.

I suspect some kind of throttling or capacity issue. The fact that it often connects first time early in the morning (Italians still asleep? Date change?) and successfully transfers megabytes of data (I was loading news pages to keep it going, and even doing Windows Updates) but then refuses to connect for hours afterwards suggests to me that that subsequent connections are being refused because 'I've used my share'. Maybe they're restricting 'tethering' - as mentioned elsewhere.

I also wondered whether, in some small places, the local GPRS capacity is low. I was on the small island of Capraia (population about 200?) for 3 days and only got a connection once during that time - very early in the morning of the day I left. Maybe it's only sized for 5 connections in total or something?

Dave