I bought a new piece of kit this week, that really made me reflect on how far things have come. Long story short, I blogged about prepping for Armageddon earlier in the year, and one thing I realised needed a major overhaul was my 'home network' - the ever-growing collection of tablets, phones desktops and the ways they connect to the Internet. I've been looking for ways to make the whole thing more robust yet less power hungry.
When 'El apagón' - the big blackout happened here in Spain earlier in the year, I found out a lot about what would happen during an extended period without electricity. During those 17 hours, one of the things I noticed was that my local ISP failed before the Internet on my mobile phone. Not 100% sure why that is but my guess is the local ISP has less emergency power backup. So in the following months I mulled this over in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that I had underestimated my local Internet connection as a single point of failure. I live in quite an isolated little village in the 'Sierra de Cádiz'. I've long suspected much of the Internet coming into and out of the town comes through line-of-sight microwaves as the connectivity often gets worse in adverse weather, particularly storms and low lying cloud. The town's electricity supply is on a knife-edge at the best of times - I personally use two uninterruptible power supplies to keep the network up as I'm used to the electric tripping out mid-poker game. The chances of losing Internet due to an electricity outage is therefore always on the cards. Then there is flooding, terrorism, meteorites - OK and straw-clutching with that one, but you get my point, it became apparent that having a backup to connect my local network to the Internet made a lot of sense.
So I began to research solutions. I could have figured out away to make my smartphone a hotspot, but the phone assumes a higher level of importance during an emergency so I didn't want it occupied on network duty. After lots of research with my friends, Claude, Grok, and ChatGTP I arrived on a solution which was to buy a second Wifi router with a 'fallback' option. It works like this. My ISP router connects to the second router, so all my network traffic passes through it. I use the new router for both Wifi and wired connections. Should the ISP connection go offline, the new router makes a 4G connection through the phone network. Within 60 seconds, I'm back online. It's like magic. I had to get a new SIM card for the router, but I shopped around and found a pre-paid card with no contract. All I have to do is put 10 euros on it every six months to keep it 'alive'. During normal operation the SIM is inactive and only makes a connection during an emergency.
After I set this up, feeling very smug and pleased with myself, I noticed on the box that the router is capable of 300Mbps - over 4G? I thought this was a mistake, but apparently due to a thing called 'carrier aggregation', under ideal conditions the thing can weave together different mobile bands making 'one big one' (given there aren't too many other folk online). This is what triggered my reflection on my path as a user of the Internet in Spain.
Back in the late 1990's when I first considered moving to Europe, Spain was one of a number of countries I was considering. Internet connectivity was a key factor, since I would be working remotely for my company in England. During my research I stumbled across an article that wrote in glowing terms about the broadband rollout in the Iberian peninsula, and how the country was 'forging ahead' as a European leader in high speed Internet connectivity. This must have been a puff-piece for Movistar or something because when I finally arrived, the truth was rather different.
The house I bought in Murcia was less than three kilometers from town. The house had mains electricity and potable water, so getting an Internet connection would be just a question of running a phone line, no? Oh how wrong I was! I made overtures to the phone company who said they would be quite happy to help if I paid several thousand pounds to install telegraph poles! There was another problem in the form of a big hill at the back of my house that made line-of-sight connectivity impossible. I was so screwed. Caveat emptor. (Some years later, I met a smarter guy than me, who had his lawyer insert a clause in the compra-venta - the presales contract that determines the conditions of sale - that broadband internet connection would be available in the property before the sale would go ahead)
I was anxious to get connected because of work, so I had a word with the owner of a local Internet cafe and negotiated a preferential rate, given that I was spending five mornings a week in there with my laptop! There was a lady who did shifts looking after the place who was a chain-smoker. I used to go home reeking of tobacco smoke and coughing like a laboratory beagle, so I was keen to find a practical alternative.
There was a Vodafone shop in the town and, although mobile phones at the time were more geared towards calls, they were offering a new card with a data tariff. It was expensive so I'd have to ration my connectivity - a bit like the early days of Compuserve where we would use an off-line-reader program to login, download a bunch of messages and log off again to minimise connection fees! So I signed up for one of these cards and a condition was I had to have an ordinary phone SIM as well. This is where something happened to my disadvantage. The lady gave me the SIM card for my phone and said the data card would arrive in the following week. While muddling through with my schoolboy Spanish, I got the impression that I could use the SIM card she gave me to connect to the Internet until the proper data card arrived. So that weekend, I made a few sojourns in to Hotmail and Google, nothing too lengthy, then swapped over to the data card in the following week. At the end of the month I got a bill for 400 euros! I remonstrated with the girl in the shop arguing that she told me I could use the other card, but she just said 'you did - it worked'. I spent hours complaining writing to regional and national offices, sending faxes at their request etc, but never did manage to get a refund.
After about a year of struggling with the SIM solution - it did work when I had the right card, a Spanish neighbour helped me wade through the bureaucratic minefield of Telefonica's Sales Order Process to get a 'fixed line' telephone. Due to the poles issue, this was provided over radio, which capped the Internet connection to a ridiculously low speed, but at least I was on all the time without the same level of metering that I suffered with the SIM card. That did me for another year or two, until an enterprising couple of English chaps in the village put their heads together and, realise there were a lot of folk in the 'campo' like me with a need for broadband, started a wireless network company.
I'm a software guy rather than a hardware guy, so a lot of what they did remains a mystery, but it seems they figured out how to bundle together a bunch of consumer internet connections from the local cable company, then bounce these around the village and then on into the houses in the country side. If like me, line of sight was unavailable, they would angle dishes on other client sites to share the signal around. However they managed it, the system worked great and at last, after about four years I finally had a fast Internet connection in Spain.
When I moved to another little village in Andalucia, most folk were using a similar wireless systems because it was cheap - subsidised either by the townhall or the regional government or both. It was pretty terrible with speeds slowing to a crawl at that time of day when the kids came home from school. The support closed on Friday afternoon and if the line went down, which was often, there was nobody to help get it back until Monday morning. In time however a couple of new entrants to the market emerged offering fibre to the home. Considering we are fairly remote I'm very impressed by this. A friend in Portland, Oregon with a holiday home here was telling me the Internet we get here is faster and cheaper than he has back home. I pay 20 euros per month and on a good day my fibre will test at 600Mbps. My ISP has a higher tariff - for a fiver a month extra I can get double that!
All of which makes me think, why on earth isn't everybody grabbing a digital nomad visa and coming to Spain to work. I often see posts on social media, especially TikTok from Americans who have moved, or are thinking of moving to Barcelona and are moaning about the price of property there. Well here's the thing, there are plenty of other places, many of which have amazing property deals. Whole villages are for sale for peanuts in some regions due to the phenomenon of rural depopulation, yet now, with Starlink in the mix providing broadband coverage through the whole of the country, there isn't a place where you can go in Spain where you would have to endure the same painful journey I did to get a good online connection.
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