Technology stats and other info.

Spanish TV across the world

The Spanish national station TVE has an international service with two channels. TVE Internacional and Canal 24 Horas. For information on how to view these channels, including the evangelical programme Buenas Noticias TV (which runs on Sundays), go to this link. The menu offers programme and technological details.

Several other Spanish channels can be seen tuning into Hispasat, which covers much of the Americas.

101% of population have mobiles (cell phones)

The next paragraph is definitely out of date! Everyone who wants one has a mobile phone. Many also have a data card for their laptops. Some are hardly beyond transistor radios and twizzle knob TVs, however, so the 100% is clearly a misnomer.

November '05. Spain is 4th in the mobile phone league, as there is now almost one line per inhabitant. Only Italy, UK and Taiwan have more lines percapita, while China is now the largest market overall. In Spain there are 38.6 million lines.

Broadband speeding up

September 2008. Telefónica is rolling out 30M optical fibre for next generation 'Trio' services with phone, internet and TV in one. 100M should not be far behind, according to the experts. 12 provinces will be sped up in time for Halloween launch. It appears that other operators will not be allowed to run services over this network.

October 2006. Ads claiming 'up to' 20Mbps have been shown to be claiming double the effective download rate. Even someone living next door to an exchange only got 16Mb and the average for top claim lines was well below half the advertised rate. Some 10,000 tests were made to reach this conclusion. Jazztel came out best of the suppliers. But it is telling that Telefonica, which controls most of the private lines and knows what they can deliver, offers only 10Mb connexions. Over half of connexions are still using the 1Mb rate.

32% of Spanish homes have Broadband access

July 2007. The number of Spaniards with broadband access is growing rapidly. 32% of homes, 87% of businesses and 81% of schools have broadband. Most are ADSL users, the remainder being cable. Well over 70% of all users are linked directly or indirectly to Telefonica's ADSL service; (most other operators are actually resellers of this service!). The government's attempts at extending broadband to rural areas are meeting some success, but also finding that the ageing population of small villages is les interested in taking up the option, particularly with the relatively high entry cost.

September '07. The latest TIC survey shows 40% of Spanish homes (6.4 million) now have internet access, including modem. In addition, the survey shows more people (32.1%) now have fixed line and mobile phones and Internet access than just two of these services (31.1%). The numbers of 'Internauts' living in rural ares is also gathering pace. Info: red.es /El Mundo. Government sources expect access to reach 80% by 2011.

In 2005 Madrid and Barcelona had over 50% of users, while another 30% were in other cities. 9 provinces had less than 10,000 connexions. The urban/rural divergence was at first wide and those with access at all tend more than ever to be moving quickly to broadband. Only 15% of the territory was covered by ADSL, although operators also offer a satellite link. 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%. In September 2004 still only 25% of homes had access to internet (at any speed), 14% were on broadband.

Digital TV - the clock ticks (one second late) towards analogue power down.

Summer 2008. Soria is the first province to have turned off analogue transmissions. (It also happens to be the one with least population!) But elsewhere people are reticent to watch digital TV, not least because they would see the goals later than their analogue neighbours. In addition, TDT, while it has extra channels, has not yet anything more to offer on most of them. And most people find a dozen channels already ten too many. It is expected that as the 2010 analogue switch-off nears, TV sets with built-in tuner-decoders will be bought by most homes, thus enabling them to make the switch more comfortably.

20th December 06. One year (and 3 weeks) after TDT, the digital TV service was launched, 1.5 million digiboxes had been sold up to October and now 2.5 million are installed (including TVs with preinstalled converters). It is calculated that 11 million people can watch digital TV, many using Sat, DSL and Cable. 82% of the territory can now get the terrestrial signal. Another 7 million people could see it installing just a digibox. But the general feeling is that it is not living up to expectations, with an imperceptible quality increase and virtually no added interactive services. However, 21 stations are now broadcast over TDT, while just 6 national stations broadcast on analogue TV.

Clicks

El Mundo.es has over 19 million unique monthly visitors

Digital news readership is continuing to rise. El Mundo, as well as a very popular printed paper, is Spain's most widely read electronic news service and in February, 2009 hit the 19,416,694 unique readers mark, having topped 10 million in September '07 and the 6 million mark in January 2005. The number increased rapidly over 2004, with events like 3/11 and the Royal Wedding. After a slowing rate in 2007, the number who prefer to save on buying a newspaper has grown fast as the recession has bit.

Other papers lag, with although the sport daily Marca (also owned by El Mundo) has reached 14 million, with the second general daily ABC now about 4.4 million. Free paper 20 Minutos has 6.8 million readers. 'Circulation' stats are the speciality of OJD 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 from OJD's media list.

The digital pages of El País, the top printed paper, aare not measured by OJD after continuous reports of clocking and similar distortions. Besides, since OJD ceased its link with the paper it has a subscriber only service. In any case, it lags behind elmundo.es

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.

Annual visits to P4S about 50,000

March '09. P4S has settled over the past year, with very variable daily visits, but with a minumum of almost 3000 per month or 100 daily, we are content. The record for visits, so far was June, '07, with 6846, but the picture varies in terms of the length of visits. The annual total appears firm at about 50,000 visits to PrayforSpain, or 120,000 pages downloaded involving over 200,000 hits.
We hardly compare with El Mundo and are finding it hard to keep up with visits to Protestante Digital, which recorded 700,000 pages in one month alone, or half a million pages (125,000 visits)in August '07, but we may well be closer to their English language visits. Thank you for your interest and support!

Ecology

Recycling

Madrid claims in 2005 to have recycled 2/3 of light packaging, such as drinks cans and 'bricks'. This was virtually double the 2004 figure.

CO2

Spain is doing rather badly in the Kioto stakes: emissions will be up 45% against the 15% objective. That's the worst in the EU. In addition, the EU commission has denounced Spain for failing to file an emissions reduction plan by June 30th (06).