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News, October, 2005More NewsA few more news items and where to find more news about Spain:Water reserves:In a year of drought, water reserves are important. At 25th October the reservoirs were still below 40% of capacity, although 0.4% higher than the start of the month. In the south east the situation is still especially critical. Over the past week rainfall was highest inland, which is especially welcome as it flows into the reservoirs, but reservoirs did not notice as much as hoped. Rivers in mid-summer were at 41% of the previous year's flow. Now, after hurricane Vince, they are double, but far more is needed. The Tajo basin has some big hydro-electric schemes, which mostly had to be turned off due to lack of flow over the summer, available reserves being fed to towns and agriculture. Now the lower Tajo reservoirs are back to almost 50% and some generation can go on, just in time to take increased evening heating and light demand as the clocks change. Water is also flowing well in Catalonia, after record rainfall in some areas. But the highest falls were on the coast and could not be retained for future use. Christmas 2005 will see terrestrial digital TV in Spain with 20 channelsNew Year '05. The service, which will give similar service and interactivity to digital satellite TV, will gradually grow from then and the analogue services will end in 2010. This means everyone will need to replace their sets -or get new digiboxes- within the next five years. The price of the decoder is about 60 Euros at present. It is estimated that currently there are 50 million sets in 12 million homes across Spain. 4.4 million Spaniards have Broadband accessOctober 2005. The number of Spaniards with broadband access is growing rapidly. Of the 4.4 million, almost 3.5 million are ADSL users, the remainder being cable. Well over 70% of all users (in fact 2,8 million) are linked directly or indirectly to Telefonica's ADSL service; (most other operators are actually resellers of this service!). Madrid and Barcelona have over 50% of users, while another 30% are in other cities. 9 provinces have less than 10,000 connexions. The urban/rural divergence is clearly growing and those who have access at all tend more than ever to be moving quickly to broadband. Only 15% of the territory is covered by ADSL, although Telefonica also offers a satellite link at 45€ per month. Telefónica claims 95% of installed lines can take ADSL, but AUI reckons the true percentage is more like 76%. Data from the Internet Users' Association. According to earlier official surveys by the National Statistics Institute in December 2002 the number of people with access to the Internet was only 17.4%, but a year later had grown to 24%. By the end of July '03, the number of ADSL lines was 1,343,823 with Madrid and Barcelona way ahead, emphasising the gap between town and country in technological advance. (El Mundo, TVE) Spain produces 200,000 tonnes of 'techno-rubbish' (old TVs, mobiles, computers, CDs, etc.) every year, of which much remains at home in garages and attics. No laws yet help us to know what to do with it all. A campaign run by the government between September 2004 and spring 2006 aims to improve rural internet access possibilites. In September 2004 still only 25% of homes have access to internet. During 2004 25% of computer sales were laptops, demonstrating the growth in demand for portable computing solutions and in particular for computers equipped with Wifi and other unwired options. Catalonia and Andalusia are experimenting with WiMax, the 35 megabit wifi solution available over a 50km distance. www.elmundo.es has over 6 million unique monthly visitorsEl Mundo, as well as a very popular printed paper, is Spain's most widely read electronic news service and first crossed the 6 million mark in January 2005. The number increased rapidly over 2004,with events like 3/11 and the Royal Wedding, but slowed early this year, reaching 6,789,725 in July '05. Other papers lag, with dailies specialising in sport having most success: www.marca.com has reached 3 million and www.as.com is now closing on 2 million, with the second general daily www.abc.es also above the million. 'Circulation' stats are the speciality of www.ojd.es which can be read in English. From all the surveys of electronic media, it is clear that they are by far the most read among office workers. More info here April 2005: The printed version of El Mundo has not suffered from its electronic daughter. In March it hit 1.387.000 copies sold daily, an increase of 5.6%, strengthening its posistion as Spain's nº2 daily newspaper. Nevertheless, this is still way behind El País, which sells over two million copies. The digital version of El País is, sadly, only available beyond the 'cover' by subscription. Yet neither of these papers sells as many as Marca, the sports daily, with over 2.5 million copies. Old News archivePast news is not all forgotten by P4S! Such items as can be found on the news pages at the end of every month are being filed in our archives. Your response and concerns are also of interest to us. Don't hesitate to let us know them Finally, more news from the churches is always available at the Protestante Digital and Protestantes sites.This week on Protestante Digital: (25th October)Irresponsible extroverts is outsider’s view of the Spanish |