How the Internet at home has evolved, from the line to the current fiber tariffs

Today, the internet is part of our daily lives and if it were to disappear, everyone would reduce their quality of life substantially. It allows us to communicate with people all over the world in a way that our reach in all walks of life is not limited to our immediate limits.

At the time of writing these lines, there is high competition to offer fiber optics to Spanish homes, offering additions such as cheaper mobile lines or an option to have fiber optics at home. But the beginnings of the Internet in Spain, if we count them, remain as if from a work of dystopian science fiction.

When we paid for minutes of use

There was a time when the only Internet operator in Spain allowed us to use the Internet without limits in the evenings and on weekends. This is that if you were a company and needed to use the internet for emails, you had to pay, since business use was one of the great sources of income for the operator.

It also caused problems such as if you were browsing the internet, you couldn't use the telephone line at a time when all conversations were still carried out remotely with the home phone, since the mobile phone was expensive and had very high call rates.

ADSL as an advance in its day, today it is obsolete

If you are of a certain age and hear “ADSL”, you will remember how truly revolutionary it was, with adverts boasting of having an ADSL line with benefits such as a speed of 6 Mbps, and that you won’t have to disconnect if you want to make a call or wait for one.

ADSL offered its advantages as not having to install a separate cable network by being able to take advantage of the cable of the telephone line and at the same time it does not occupy the signal of the calls. All this with a speed that in 2002 reached 2Mb/s. In its day it was impressive, today it is considered somewhat slow. Its main drawback was that it was limited to large population centers. This made it difficult for the Internet to reach small cities, which would benefit from better communications, while smaller urban centers or those with protected architectures would not have it as widely available.

It seems to be a technology of yesteryear, but the reality is that a significant part of Spanish homes only have ADSL. Although we see fiber optics as a quality internet standard, around one and a half million households in Spain still depend on ADSL according to figures from last year. To compare, at least 14.000.000 lines are fiber, so there is still a significant percentage of users with low-speed internet for today's needs.

A strike of internet users for democratic rates

One of the most important events to make the internet we know today was the internet user strike in June 1999. Víctor Domingo, president of the Internet Users Association, managed to organize internet users to fight against the added cost of internet bills if they used it during working hours. This strike was joined by support from organizations such as the DGT and even political parties such as the PSOE.

This action was the precursor to the current flat rates that we know and continue to enjoy today. If you look at your bill, you see that they do not have unexpected costs for accessing certain pages or at certain times, achieving total net neutrality. Thanks to them we know exactly how much we will pay online, without further costs on the bill.

High competitiveness and a national right to fiber optics

Although at the time we had the national telephone company offering ADSL, and one or two competitors, with 20 Mbps ads, today the fiber optic internet offer is highly competitive. There is the thought that the internet offer is a zero-sum game, that is, if you have a client, you take it away from all the competitors, because a home does not need more than one internet service and it will stay with the best offer, with the best speed, price or package, even if you don't use it all.

Today any operator is going to give you an optical fiber, possibly 100 Mbps, 300 Mbps or even 1 Gbps, if possible symmetrical, almost always with no minimum stay so you can decide to change immediately and without commitment, and with call packages and data for a mobile line if it is from the same operator. Today we have innumerable fiber optic options, each one for a different type of user, so knowing how to choose it is important.

It is not uncommon to change from one internet company to another for a speed increase. Although being honest, elements like that there is always confusion with the speed offered since they are advertised in megabits or gigabits, not megabytes or gigabytes; and that the total speed offered is not used unless we use a router that allows such speed, and we have several simultaneous connections to collapse the line.

Now that remote work is being established, and it may be a way to repopulate small cities, the Government of Spain is preparing a law in which every home in Spain, possibly having to be registered as such in the cadastre; have the possibility of contracting 100 Mbps. And this will be guaranteed by law. With this, any town will be able to welcome the so-called digital nomads, the wandering workers who will be able to stay in rural houses instead of in expensive business hotels, and any house will be able to have the internet tools to have a minimum quality of life.

And this is how the internet is on a physical level, because we haven't started talking about the internet on the mobile. Although in its day SMS developed a way of writing to adapt to the scarce space of characters in each message because each message had costs, today SMS are in use relegated to receiving confirmation messages from banks, companies or official bodies so that it reaches our mobile phone without going through emails. When WhatsApp arrived, people gladly paid one euro a year because after sending ten messages, they have already sent more than they could with SMS. Today we have speeds with which we can watch streaming in 4K on a tablet, without cables.