Hi

hopefully someone can give me a yes or no on this…

Recently I moved to Portugal from the UK for a while - having been used to whatever, 2mb ADSL in UK I was delighted to see that they had like 16mb broadband here.

I do some film work which means moving around of large files - so fast internet was a dream…

Dream was shattered though, when on my first few days at the hotel they slapped me with a 700 euro bill for bandwidth use in ONE DAY! Apparently, catching up on work I was behind on during the move, I’d used up more bandwidth in one day than the hotel had used in the last year! What’s a measly 23Gb these days - lol…. anyway you live and learn.

So basically, although you have some fast connections here, your bandwidth is limited to some derisory amount like 2Gb a month(unless you want to pay 90 euros a month to your ISP for unlimited - which I had to in the end).

Anyway, I’m rambling - my question is, is this the same in spain? Is broadband or cable limited upload/download? Or is it generally unlimited?

And if it is limited, can you get unlimited? And if so, what’s the typical costs?

Your help would be appreciated - thanks!

Wow, 700 euros, that’s insane. 23 GB isn’t much these days though, you’re right.

I believe most normal ADSL connections are unlimited. I’ve racked up 10s of gigs in a month before without hearing from anyone about it, but that was on a 2mb connection.

Has anyone else read the specifics about limited/unlimited use lately?

lol… yes it was rather a kick in the goolies. But short of throwing the suitcase out the window and legging it, wasn’t much I could do - for anyone travelling to Portugal ever, do bear this in mind… personally if I was the hotel manager I would’ve told the ISP to shove it, since it strikes me that if they let you just download willy nilly without any warning, and for example you have a kid that gets onto the net and starts downloading music and stuff, the next thing you know you’ve racked up a 1000 euro bill, which seems to be more than the monthly average wage here.

So, it’s not a great system here.

Hopefully Spain is a bit better… I’ve recently been told that the UK has started to adopt the limited downloads model. I don’t know if this was an experiment, or only on some ISPs - but my mate was on 8mb connection and only ever getting less than 1mb speeds - he read the small print to find that apparently if you download more than XGb or whatever a month, they cut your connection speed.

It’s no better than the old ‘anytime connection’ on the old dialup - ‘anytime’, 24 hours a day, as long as you don’t use it for more than 12 hours a day. Greed and misrepresentation at it’s best.

Anyway, thanks for your reassurance - and if anyone know the absolute lowdown on any tricks and swerves I might expect from Spanish ISPs that differ from swerves I expect from UK or Portugese ISPs, I’d be grateful to hear about them.

Thanks.