In Urban Areas
In most Spanish cities, suburbs, and mid-size towns there is usually a choice of Internet service. There's dial-up, of course, as well as DSL and, in the cities, cable. Speed and reliability of the various services are probably as good as anywhere in the US, but the monthly cost in Spain is a bit higher.

In Rural Areas
Out in the sticks, though, it's a different story. Some have no phone lines. With rural homes scattered around the countryside, there are plenty of areas that never had real copper telephone lines and will never have them. It's just not economically feasible to run miles and miles of wire to so few houses. Our home is in this category.

In Our Case
When we first moved to Galicia in 1997, we lived in a rented house in the beach town of Miño while we were having a house built in the sticks. While we were in Miño we had a dial-up Internet connection just like everyone in the USofA had at that time. In 1999, when we moved to the house out in the country, though, that changed - a lot.

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There was basic phone service via a 1992-era "radio phone" setup available to people living beyond the phone lines. Intended for voice calls, it was designed long before anyone around here ever heard of the Internet. With a good modem this system sometimes worked at 2400 - 4800 bps. So we even tried using a cellular phone that worked at 9600 bps. (But it was very expensive.)

In 2004, the telephone company offered upgrades to rural customers if they asked for it. We did. And it was an improvement but it wasn't very reliable for anything but voice calls. (We kept the other cellular service as a backup.)

In 2006, we got fed up with that unreliable service and subscribed to a cellular Internet service that was actually designed for people moving around with laptop PCs. It worked at 64K bps, but wasn't very reliable.

By the time 2008 rolled around, we had been reading about Telefónica's latest attempt at wireless Internet service. There were plenty of newspaper articles about it but nothing on their website. Thanks to my sister-in-law Rosa we eventually found out more about it.

Rosa started by calling the company's Customer Service number. One representative, who obviously knew nothing about the subject, told her that LMDS was a type of software! She eventually gave up on the Customer "Service" people and contacted people inside the company with whom she already had a good working relationship. That really got the ball rolling.

Thanks to her efforts, Telefónica's subcontractor installed the LMDS hardware on June 6th, 2008. The system has worked well so far - reliable and with almost no down-time. I finally have a 256K bps Internet connection worthy of the name. Thanks, Rosa!