Comparing costs

I've mentioned before the high cost of broadband access here in Spain. Just to illustrate the comparison though.

For the Duo package from Telefonica we pay 40€ per month. That includes local and national calls ( not calls to mobiles) and a 3Mb Internet connection. On top of that we have line rental, phone rental and ADSL maintenance costs which bump it up to over 74€ per month.

Both my daughters in England live close to their local telephone exchanges and so are able to get high speed access. Jemma, who lives in Wolverhampton could get a theoretical maximum speed of 5.5Mbs whilst Laura who lives in Sale could get a maximum of 6.5Mbs.

So first of all they benefit from twice the available speed for their connections. More important though the cost per month is a great deal less. For example, signing up for Virgin's Unlimited Broadband and Talk package (bundle 1) costs £19.99 per month. For that they'd have unlimited local and national calls and up to 8Mb broadband with no limits on downloads. At the present exchange rate that works out at 26.79€ per month. Even when the rate was 1.5€ to the pound it would only cost 29.99€ per month. On top of that they'd have to pay line rental e.g. to BT at £11 per month.

So for a total of £30.99 (41.53€) my daughter's could enjoy the same service, with a higher speed connection. That is a whopping 32.50€ less per month.

Of course there are other packages available in Spain e.g. Orange are offering a package which includes telephone, broadband Internet and TV from 43.95€ per month. Once the twelve month Telefonica contract expires I'll be looking to change to a more economical package.

PS Without the broadband connection we couldn't make VoIPtalk calls to the UK. Using VoIPtalk saves us a lot e.g. an 11 minute call to our friends in Gloucester at the weekend only cost us 2.2 pence UK.

I'm getting 3402Kbps downstream and 268kbps upstream at the moment which is the limit that Telefonica say my line can support.