GETTING CONNECTED TO THE WEB IN SPAIN when you don’t have a phone line.

Spain has the lowest number of telephone land lines per head of population in Europe. Outside the main cities and towns the countryside is largely unpopulated and underdeveloped. Many people today are living without mains water or electricity, never mind phone lines!

I live on a modern urbanisation near to a small town which not only has telephone lines but high spec fibre optic cables feeding in high speed ADSL access.

My neighbours and I have been waiting 6 years for phone lines to connect us to the outside world.

In the meantime, I have put together this guide to internet access in Spain.

The choices for those without telephone lines are:

·         Satellite

·         Mobile broadband

·         WiMAX

Satellite

This is an expensive option but sometimes the only one available. My neighbours all signed up to it, but I didn’t as it costs €400-600 to set up, then something like €40 a month on top of that. Also, the system keeps crashing depending I suppose on how many users are online at the time.

Mobile Broadband

All the main providers offer 3G broadband, but where I live only Orange actually have 3G. Euphony is another company that use Orange’s network so they have 3G too. Vodafone and Movistar don’t have 3G coverage here, as yet.

Orange costs more or less €45 a month, including VAT, and includes 5GBs of traffic. Go over your limit, as I do regularly, and they cut your speed to 128Kbs/s.

Euphony wants €99 up front, to pay for the dongle, and then €24.90 plus VAT per month, but this only includes 1 GB of traffic.

Vodafone are €45 a month, including VAT, with a 3GB traffic limit per month.

Movistar are around €30 a month with only 1GB of traffic. They may have another package but I found their website difficult to navigate.

Wi-MAX

This could be the future for getting everyone online at fast browsing speeds and unlimited downloads, but the one area in Spain which offers it at the moment as just south of here and I am maybe 30 miles outwith their vast coverage area, unfortunately while other sites discuss the merits of the Wi-MAX, they suggest it should be the cheapest option available, but here in Spain it is on offer at around €90 s month, twice the price of other connections.

Wi-MAX is the next step up from Wi-Fi. One mast can cover an area of 30 square miles, and all you need is a receiver fitted to your house to pick up its signal.

Read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiMAX

It sounds like the perfect solution for rural Spain.

However, I wait for the day when Spain catches up with the UK and offers cheap internet access, because €40+ a month is just too expensive.