This is how the Internet advances through the offer of fiber and mobile phones in Spain

The internet that we enjoy today, with fiber and mobile offerings, is light years away from what internet access used to be. Limitations, additional payments and low speeds made it a luxury and not a tool for everyday use.

Very few users will remember when at the time you had to pay for the line and use a sound modem to connect and that it is at certain times so as not to pay an additional cost in the bill, and with the addition of having to disconnect the modem if we expected or wanted to make a phone call because it took up the entire line. In comparison, today we always have some fiber and mobile offer for less than what the basic connection cost us in its day, and with the final price without having to hire a fixed telephone line, something that is no longer in use today.

The arrival of ADSL and other small steps for the democratization of the Internet

An Internet connection was at the time a luxury that very few households could afford or take advantage of, since even many services that were offered were conditioned by low connection speed. Together with the additional prices for connecting at certain hours, they made it above all a fairly limited leisure product that would only be used on weekends, not as an important work and development tool.

It was far from being able to play online except for very limited games such as Warcraft III or Age of Empires II, and on consoles it was only possible in a limited number of games that did not reach two figures. Today, the game that does not have an online mode is rare, and we can thank the implementation of high-speed lines for that.

ADSL offered its advantages such as not having to install a separate cable network by being able to take advantage of the telephone line cable and not occupying the call signal, and with a speed that in 2002 reached 2Mb / s. Although it was limited to large population centers. This made it difficult for small cities to reach the internet, which would benefit from better communications.

Another important point to make the internet that we know today was the Internet Strikes. Víctor Domingo, president of the Association of Internet Users, managed to organize internet users to fight against the added cost in the internet bill if they used it during business hours, which achieved the current flat rates that we know and continue to enjoy today, free of charge. unexpected. Thanks to them we know exactly how much we will pay for an internet that is increasingly becoming an important tool.

From ADSL to fiber optics in almost all of Spain

Although at the time ADSL was considered vital to bring the Internet to the millions of Spanish homes, today it is disappearing. A recent report quantifies active ADSL lines at just 1.500.000. A figure for which we must go back to 2003 when the number of households that were contracting this ADSL was rising. Meanwhile, today there are 12.000.000 fiber optic lines in Spain, many of them with a mobile line offer to make connectivity more complete. This year 1.400.000 new fiber optic lines have been registered and it is expected to continue growing.

Today fiber optics is spreading its availability throughout the country exponentially and quite quickly. Many rural towns are beginning to have high-speed internet, which opens the possibilities to be repopulated through the normalization of teleworking. And is that for the Internet to improve people's quality of life, it not only has to be available, it has to be accessible through offers with transparent prices and high speed.