Back on line

My father always said “don’t speak too soon” and I certainly did when I said that we would probably keep the connection from Wi-Surf because it had become reliable. Our Internet connection went over a month ago. At first we were told that it was a satellite connection failure following a thunderstorm and that the provider was working day and night to fix it. Then we were told the provider had gone bankrupt and a new provider would need to be contacted: estimated time for reconnection 14 – 28 days. This was like déjà vu because the last time we had a long period of disconnection the provider had gone bust and had been taken over by the present company.

Anyway we were then told that we would be reconnected within 7 days (sic) by ADSL rather than by satellite. Now that was good news because an ADSL connection should be more reliable. An ADSL connection would also make the phone useable. The question was then, how were they going to provide us with an ADSL connection? Obviously we would still use the existing wireless setup to connect to the Wi-Surf server up at the Pedrera but how were Wi-Surf going to connect the wireless setup to ADSL without a cable? There is no cable up to the Pedrera and it doesn’t look as if there will be in the near future. Apparently their plan was to use a hybrid system that would relay an ADSL connection from a site where there was a cable via microwaves to our site at the Pedrera. The hybrid system, although not as good as true ADSL, would make the phone useable.

It seems that for the moment that will not be possible so Wi-Surf have had to resort back to a satellite connection with a different provider.Since VOIP is useless over a satellite connection, we will definitely move over to Telefonica for the phone as soon as we can. We will keep the Wi-Surf connection for the Internet though for two reasons.

1. Internet providers in Spain work with much higher contention ratios than Wi-Surf i.e more users share the connection speed.
2. Although Bigastro has an ADSL enabled exchange we don’t know where that is. If the exchange is too far away then our potential speed will be limited.

I’d like to see what other people’s experiences are like before making the decision to move from Wi-Surf.

The Town Hall has now collated the names and mobile numbers of all the people at Villas Andrea who want a phone. These will be passed on to Telefonica who should contact us to let us know when that will be possible. Since all the cables are now laid we are told that could be before Christmas.