The other interesting thing came from some experimenting with Wfi and VoIP. Since it was a business trip, I took my laptop and naturally my mobile phone. And since it would have been rude to visit Amsterdam just for the one night of the Panasonic press trip, I went a couple of days earlier and stayed in a small hotel in the city centre.

Free Wifi in hotel rooms has various advantages; besides the obvious one of being able to do your work, you can also tune in to the BBC's radio streams of course. But something I was keen to try out was avoiding roaming charges; even after the EU caps, they're still frankly pretty expensive.

Some time ago, regular readers of PCW may remember, I wrote about using a Nokia N95 with the Asterisk PBX software (you can find the article here). Quite a few of the Nokia phones have support for the open SIP standard, which means that as well as using them with software like Asterisk, you can use them with a calling service such as VOIPtalk, so if there's free Wifi in your hotel, or conference centre, then in theory you can make and receive calls much more cheaply.

And it worked a treat - mostly. I'll come to the caveat later. But with calls to UK or Netherlands landlines at 1.4 pence per minute, and to UK mobiles at 11.9p, it beats 38 pence per minute to call home. There's no setup fee, so you can just top up with £5, and get an 056 number for people to call you on - it'll cost them the same as a UK local call, and you'll also avoid the 19 pence per minute for incoming calls.

On a Nokia phone that supports SIP, it's incredibly easy. Once you've set the phone up, you can sign in to the SIP service when you're connected to a Wifi network, then find a number in your phone book and instead of pressing the green button, just call up the menu and choose 'Internet call' instead. Quality was, largely, excellent, with none of the annoying echo that I've sometimes had when roaming, or on poor VoIP networks. Over the course of my stay, I tried three different hotel Wifi networks, and none blocked SIP calls - so for the sake of a £5 topup, it's worth investigating, if you have a compatible phone.

What of the Wifi hell mentioned in the headline? Well, all the places I stayed or visited had Wifi, and advertised it as free. But in the first hotel, there were times I felt like throwing the laptop at the wall. It was impossible to maintain a connection for long, and to make a Wifi call I had to walk down two flights of impossibly steep Dutch stairs to the lounge, as that was the only place to get a good signal. The laptop would keep reporting that it was no longer connected to the internet, unless I left it in the corner of my room by the bathroom door - hardly convenient for work.

The hotel assured me their wireless network was set up by a professional, four years ago. And the four years is probably the important part. Back then, wireless wasn't quite as widespread as it is now. Today, it's very different - as I found out when I fired up iStumbler, the Mac equivalent of Netstumbler. While the network was indeed working fine down in the lounge, in my hotel room it was an entirely different matter. I could certainly see both the hotel's basestations - amongst the 22 wireless networks visible in my hotel room.

Of those, a dozen were overlapping either completely or partly with the wireless channel used by my hotel; even if the hotel changed the channel of their network, the smallest number of overlapping networks they could have achieved would have been eight, so it's likely performance would still have been pretty dismal.

At the hotel where I stayed for the Panasonic convention, there was free Wifi too - though they recommended you used the wired connection, which they charged you for. It turned out the wired one simply wouldn't work, redirecting everything to a random holding page that never showed up.

But the Wifi wasn't always much better, at least in the rooms, probably down to the modern steel construction of the building. And, as all the assembled hacks from the UK and elsewhere checked into their rooms and signed on, speed plummeted.

Making VoIP calls worked - but only if I went to the lobby or stood in the corridor outside my room - neither of which would be ideal for a late night call to the loved ones.

So, I can say that VoIP on a Nokia phone is a geat idea for avoiding roaming charges, as long as you can get a decent Wifi connection. But perhaps hotel Wifi has had its day, especially in densely populated cities like Amsterdam.