Cannes, France in February and the seaside walkways - traditionally the preserve of skateboarders and poodle-tooting pensioners - are suddenly overrun by geeks with mobile phones glued to their ears.
Yes, the 3GSM exhibition is in town bringing with it thousands of delegates, exhibitors and journalists from all over Europe.
If the locals had taken a closer look at the gathered telecoms throng they might have noticed that a few of the delegates' brows were a little more furrowed than usual. That's because, in an irony so delicious you couldn't make it up, one of the world's leading telecoms shows had a temporary communications breakdown.
For a period on Tuesday, journalists in the press office were left staring at error messages on the screen, as they were unable to access the web. A wholesale exodus to the Orange Wi-Fi area proved too much for the network there, with the system either crashing or running at speeds slower than a dial-up connection.
And while most of the delegates were armed with GPRS phones, trying to make calls or collect e-mail proved very tricky, given the huge strain all the tech-crazed execs were putting on the network.
Technologies that really should work seamlessly just weren't delivering the goods. While I'm hazarding a guess here, I imagine it is a scenario that many of the delegates have nightmares about as they wait for the Europe-wide roll out of 3G mobile phone services later this year.
Sure, in every corner of the show the talk was of the upcoming super-fast network. There were big 3G announcements, with new handsets from Motorola, NEC and LG, and news of 3G roll out plans from Orange and Vodafone. But you could almost sense nervousness about the format and in particular how the networks were going to tempt consumers into upgrading.
When 3G was first mooted at the turn of the century, handset manufacturers and networks predicted that a rush of content-driven services would prove irresistible to consumers. Yet as the existing 3G networks have found to their cost, making video calls and downloading music and sports footage just hasn't captured their customers' imagination.
Mobile gaming was seen as another of 3G's trump cards. However not too impressive sales figures for the Nokia N-Gage tend to suggest that the mobile gaming industry has a long way to go.
Being able to download new music to a phone was also trotted out as one of 3G's killer apps. Oddly there was curiously little said at 3GSM about music downloads over 3G, in spite of the fact that O2 was expected to unveil deals with manufacturers and other networks about its music download system.
So maybe photo messaging is the key? Well, the industry keeps its figures for the sending of MMSes close to its chest, but seasoned mobile observers believe they are way below networks' expectations, and that consumers are using their mobile phones as mini digital photo albums rather than sending images to their friends.
There only appears to be one aspect of 3G that really does chime with consumers and ironically that is low-tech cheap voice calls. On Monday 3 in the UK confirmed its worst kept secret - that it was launching a pay-as-you-go service. Orange's chief operating officer, Sanjiv Ahuja, instantly countered by adding that his company was considering a similar service.
Cheaper voice calls are all very well, but they are hardly the vehicle through which the networks are likely to claw back the billions of pounds they invested in 3G networks in the first place.
I suspect that privately several networks see 3G's prospects as hanging on the whims of the business community. Vodafone has already shown the way with its 3G mobile Connect card for laptops, which launches next month. The idea of broadband web surfing speeds on the go is hugely attractive to certain sections of the business community, and I suspect that corporates will have to pay handsomely for the use of that bandwidth.
The one fly in the ointment for 3G in the business community is, of course, Wi-Fi, which offers many of the benefits of 3G yet is significantly cheaper to set up. If 3GSM is anything to go by, networks and handset manufacturers are prepared to keep their options open. Both Nokia and Motorola unveiled Wi-Fi enabled business handsets while almost all the big networks were underlining their stake in the format.
How much Wi-Fi will impact on the growth of 3G in the corporate market really is anyone's guess. Those how seek the true mobile office will probably be happy to stump up for both taking advantage of Wi-Fi's fast speeds when they can and using 3G for the rest of the time.
How far the business community warms to 3G though will depend on it proving itself quickly. And to get a network up and running seamlessly in a short space of time would be a first in the mobile phone industry.
It is a given in the mobile phone industry that 3G will establish itself as the next telecoms format - the industry has invested too heavily in it for it to fail. However 3G is in for a rocky ride. It's a good job the networks have deep pockets.
