This little jewel was a first-generation analog cell phone enclosed in a plastic box. Yes, in the top box it actually had a cell-phone handset connected to an interface board and they both were powered by a rechargeable battery in the bottom box. It connected directly to the house's telephone wiring.

It worked okay (without much static) for voice calls but was next to useless for the Internet. It connected at 2400 or 4800 bps, which was barely enough for e-mail, assuming there were no graphics attached to incoming mail. (We tried using a regular cellular phone but realized in a hurry how expensive that could get.)

To update our website, or do any serious browsing, I had to go into town and use the local "ciber-café". I'd carry my FTP program on one floppy disk and my update files on another. Later on I started using a USB 'thumb drive', instead.

Under pressure from either the government or the EU, and probably with a hefty subsidy, Telefónica replaced the 'radio phones' with this unit, which was designed to provide high-quality voice service and connect to the Internet at a blazing 64K bps. It worked as advertised for voice but for Internet connections, though, it left a lot to be desired. It worked at about 48K bps when you could get a connection, and that speed was obviously a big improvement over the previous set-up. But it was damned hard to get a connection.

Dial-up attempts seldom resulted in a busy signal. But Telefónica apparently never dedicated much Internet equipment to this system. It took an average of 11 dialing attempts to get connected and logged on and the first connection usually lasted less than a minute.

From what I read, other users had similar experiences with it.

We ran across this while visiting some friends. It's a PCMCIA card that works as a modem and cellular Internet connection for laptops. We bought the same kind of card and plugged it into an adapter board in out desktop PC. The card was designed to work at 64K bps in a GPRS mode and at 384K bps in a UMTS mode. But we didn't have UMTS coverage in our area.

Vodafone offered a fixed-rate Internet tarifa plana with the cost based on data transfer rather than on connect time. We opted for 1Gb per month, which allowed us about 30Mb per day. That seemed to be plenty for our use. It was more expensive (€ 39/month*) than Telefónica's ISP service (€ 22/month*) but it was the only alternative to Telefónica we could find that would work out here in the sticks.

This system wasn't much more reliable than Telefónica's GPRS.

This is Telefónica's latest attempt at providing decent Internet connections to their rural customers who don't have hard-wired telephone service. It's an LMDS (Local Multipoint Distribution Service) system that's capable of providing simultaneous voice and Internet service.

Its data channel can theoretically reach speeds up to several megabits per second but the initial installations were "throttled back" to 256K. That's puny compared to DSL speeds but it's X4 the speed we were getting from our crappy GPRS system.

Telefónica now offers higher LMDS speeds, but at much higher costs. Our 512K speed costs € 75/month. You'd pay € 150/month for 1Meg bps. For now, 512K is fast enough if you don't download music or video.

More important is the matter of reliability, which the previous systems sorely lacked. This LMDS service began on June 23, 2008, and it has been very dependable.