Alex Little

I’ve now added to my growing collection of mobile voice and internet sim cards, dongles and pay as you go (prepago in Spanish) accounts. Today, with a lot of help from my Spanish speaking colleague Jaime, I got myself sorted out with a local mobile internet sim card with dongle. Buying the sim card and dongle was no problem language-wise, but getting the information as to how to top up, where I can buy credit, getting the correct settings for Ubuntu etc needed a long phone call to their tech support helpline.

As I’ve mentioned before, not staying in the same place quite long enough (or not knowing how long I’ll be staying) doesn’t make it worthwhile getting a contract account (or broadband installed at home) so means I’m paying the top price for all the phone and data services. The cost of mobile broadband is far higher here in Spain than the UK. In UK I paid 15GBP (around 17EUR) for 3Gb to use within a month, which I thought was bad enough, but in Spain I’ll be paying 20EUR for 1Gb to use within a month. So more than 3 times as much. The small consolation I have is that after I’ve topped up 3 times, I get 2Gb free – so that’s 60EUR for 5Gb.
Hopefully though, whilst in the UK my mobile dongle was my only means of internet access, here I can use the office connection much of the time.

One slight quirk with my new internet account is that to find out how much data I have left for the month, I need to send an email with my phone no and ask for the data balance. When I asked what format the email needed to be in (assuming that it would be an automated response) I was told that the format doesn’t matter as it will be a real person looking up my balance and replying manually – possibly one of the reasons for the high cost.

I’ve just moved back to my old house in Northampton and have been trying to figure out if there is a way to get a decent broadband connection at home but without a 12+ month contract. there do seem to be a few places which offer shorter contracts (1 or 3 month notice), but then a phone line is also needed – which again, requires a 12 month contract. Plus for the short term contracts, there is a connection fee. The only place I found that would offer short term broadband plus phone was IDnet (http://www.idnet.net) – but this is going to be an expensive option. £17.99 per month for broadband, £10 per month for line rental and £47 connection fee = total of £130.97 for 3 months (or about £44 per month). I’m currently using a o2 mobile broadband dongle (£15 per month or 3Gb download), so works out at £45 for 3 months, unless I start going over the 3Gb limit (very likely). Although even with allowing for spending on extra downloads, this will still works out much cheaper. If anyone has any better, cheaper suggestions (not including hacking a neighbours wireless connection!), I’d be very interested to hear.

The main downside I’ve found with the mobile broadband is the speed, it’s noticeably slower than fixed line broadband – although with the connection speeds I had in Ethiopia, the mobile broadband in UK is a vast improvement in terms of both speed and cost. Whilst in Addis the other day I noticed that the CDMA internet connection was far slower than that available in Mekelle, I expect as a result of the number of people using CDMA now and the lack of capacity in the infrastructure. As a result more people are buying EVDO connections – these are monthly contracts and quite expensive (approx 460 birr per month minimum). If EVDO becomes too popular it’s only a matter of time before these seem slow and unreliable.

Apart from these hassles, moving back to the house has been good. Realised just how much stuff I managed to pack into the loft, so have spent the last couple of days moving everything down and getting it sorted out. Most of which I’ll get rid of in one form or another (freecycle, charity shops etc).