My Vodafone mobile contract is 24 months - unless I pay somewhere around 250€ to cancel it

Davexf

I was talking about Movistar.

I have had bad experience with Movistar so am wary of Telefonica

If you got a "free" phone with your 24 month contract, then naturally they will want you to pay for it if you decide to cancel the contract. A "free" phone is really the only reason to take a contract anyway.

You can buy an excellent Android phone with all the trimmings, unlocked, dual sim and all the desirable features for €99 now. If you buy your own phone, PayG is always much cheaper and more flexible than a contract.

Unless you already have a landline and ADSL with Movistar, in which case the mobile contract is effectively free as the total cost of a Fusion contract is less than you pay for just ADSL and a line.

I know a number of people who have changed over and bought a cheap Smartphone and ditched PAYG.

That may work in other places, but I had to ditch my land line / ADSL with Movistar, as it was much too unreliable - especially for the premium paid for it. Plus, my 6Mb internet on a good day might reach 800kbps.

I opted for WIMAX, which is far more reliable and renders far faster internet speeds for a little more than half the price. Not to mention very cheap international phone rates, a mere fraction of Movistar.

What are your experiences of WIMAX? In our area WiMAX is offered by Iberbanda (Telefonica), they offer a range of packages which claim 3Mbps and download packages with various download limits - up to 6Gb. Can you get get reasonable IPTV streaming with the cheaper packaes or do you need the big package to provide downloads for buffering?

I results vary from area to area, but we've found our WIMAX to be about 1000% more reliable than a land line, and far faster. But we are also not in the city, where internet infrastructure is usually a lot better (but not necessarily).

We have 4Mb WIMAX, not from Telefonica but a small regional provider, "IB Red". It's fast, a little more than half the price of Telefonica, and is dramatically better than the old 6Mb Telefonica line we had, which typically delivered about 600Kbps, never delivered more than 1Mb, and was non-functional for some period of time almost every day, and never worked when raining. For 5 years we tried to get Telefonica to fix it, but all they did was exchange routers (about 10 times), which never changed a thing. IB red also offers up to 20Mb WIMAX, but we don't want to pay that much.

Nonetheless, like all internet around here, even the WIMAX can't seem sustain a decent video stream for more than about an hour without some sort of glitch or dropout rendering picture freezes (or stopping the programme altogether), blockiness or other problems like audio going out of sync. I'm not clear whether it's the WIMAX system or just the nature of internet that causes it.

I've been told I only need to have the right kind of pixels on my TV, but I find that advice to be a little dubious, since HD satellite and HD movies from local hard disk are stunning on the very same system :-)

Many thanks - useful, practical information.

but you have to take a telephone line at around €15 + iva which effectively doubles the base cost - unless someone somewhere has found out how to get ADSL on its own, which I would take as all landline phone calls are on voip.

they also do packages involving mobile contracts and 4G as well as Fibre, but the roll out of fibre is sparse in this part of Granada province and I don't see why I should upgrade to 4G for no benefit

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quite correct, I bought a Samsung Mini from MediaMkt for €88 last year, swopped in the card off my old 1G Nokia added an €8 memory card and started flying.

not so sure the cost of calls is cheaper, thought they were dearer the way I keep pumping money in - and they also charge for asking how much is left.

If you check the post I was replying to it said:-

They are by no means the cheapest , but we have found them most reliable
39.95 for Broadband only,

That is what Movistar used to charge for the ADSL add on and clearly the poster was not aware that the prices had come down - Movistar never tell existing customers and just keep charging the old amount until you complain.

Incidentally Movistar don't charge me for 4G - it's free. I can't really see the point of it as if you use it a lot you will blow your monthly data allowance away in minutes! I can usually get well over 10mb/s on my phone using 3G which is fast enough for me.

Fred can I apply for the new rate, I only had a line fitted 2 months back ?

We have a PayG flat rate of €10 per month, which gives us 1GB data (never use that much), 20 texts (never used - we use whatsapp almost exclusively) and 20 mins talk time nationally (also rarely used up). Calls between Spanish mobiles of same provider (Vodafone) are also free. We have multiple email accounts always active on both phones, use whatsapp constantly, surf the web a lot, and still never hit the limit of data usage. Of course at home and in the office we have WIFI, which cuts our mobile data usage dramatically.

For (I believe) €16 per month, national talk time goes up to 40 mins, and for €20/mo it's 80 mins. talk and unlimited data (I think).

We don't use the mobiles for dialing-out all that much (receiving calls are of course free), so we rarely go over the limits, but even after hitting the limit, call costs are pretty much the same as a contract. Certainly I have never hit the limits of data or texts.

Now, if you use your mobile for calling out constantly or use a million texts, or use a huge amount of data, then such plans may not be suitable for you. But it works for us. "Almost free" is how I'd characterise it. But you need your own unlocked phone.

Does the receiver need whatsapp to receive the texts ?