Friday, March 07, 2008

Ciao Bella!

This week (and next week) I find myself in Rome Italy. One of my workmates (Paul Rigatti) and I are here in town lining up a house (villa) to use for demonstrations of my company's in-building cellular coverage product. I hate being away from home without Bonnie, but I guess if I have to be out, Italy is not a bad spot.....

The idea is to find a nice looking house that has some serious cellular coverage issues, put our system in the house and then invite local wireless operators in to see what an amazing difference it makes on voice coverage and data throughput. We have done this before, you can read about our testing and demos in England in Ireland in previous post.

We have covered a lot of ground this trip. There are not may highways in the countryside north of Rome, so Paul an I, in our trusty rental car (a ford fiesta) have crossed fields, forded streams, slid up and down slopes and bounced along many dirt roads.

We did find one beautiful stone house in the country, the owner, who's name is Guido, was very inviting. Unfortunately, the house had NO cellular coverage and it is is hard to improve on nothing. The house it self was so nice that I would like to find a way to take advantage of it's seven bedrooms for personal use at some point in the future.

Eventually we found another house on the shores of a large lake that provides most of the fresh water to this section of the country. This is large, atrractive and has areas with OK wireless coverage and other areas with no service at all. Just perfect for us to demo our product.

Bonnie was not at all happy with me spending two weeks in Italy without her. When I told her about my upcoming trip, she lovingly told me "you suck!". She reminded me of this several times as I was preparing to travel. However as soon as I get home, we are going to sneak away for a three day weekend together!

One other woman in my life, is my trusted travel agent Muriel. This long suffering lady constanlty puts up with me calling at the last minute and asking for impossible international arrangements at the lowest possible rates. She was very vocal about me wandering all over Italy drinking excellent red wine. I told her I thought I would be working almost the all the time, but that I would try and find an opportunity to lift a glass in her honer. So Cheers to you Muriel and all the rest of my family and Friends!