It’s not just fast, it’s Fibre Optic!

Times, they are a changing. Fibre optic is coming to Pera, yes our little village is going global and the sales people from Portugal Telecom (PT) have been round! We are lucky, I think PT ran out of fibre optic cable and Pera is the end of the line! (It’s the same (I hear) for the mains drains, anything above Pera is not connected).

In fact large towns like Figueira da Foz are without fibre optic because the law in Portugal has recently changed to allow any provider the opportunity to 'rent' the lines of PT. So, what have PT done? They've stopped putting in the lines of course! A law which is suppose to benefit everyone, gives consumers choice and adds some competition to the marketplace, has backfired a little and the result is a deadlock that ends up stalling progress!

So with a promise of a whopping 30mb speed guaranteed we signed up! Now we wait for the change-over and for the obligatory moody PT engineer to come and drill another hole in our wall for another cable. But, Peter assures me, it’ll all pay off, as our whole online experience will change. O

ur ADSL is so very slow, results of the ‘speed’ test prove that. Upload 'speed' 0.42mbs!

But in August it gets worse and even getting onto the internet is a problem as thousands of holiday-makers log in and use up what little speed there is facebooking their photos!

But what does a high connection speed really mean? Will I have to work faster just to keep up? Will the murder mysteries I watch on You Tube be clearer/better? Will my Skype experience be ‘enhanced’?

Having spent two hours only yesterday trying to download Instagram to my crap (and yes cheap) Android phone, only to realise that the bloody thing does ‘not support Google Play’ I feel that the whole mobile phone and tablet revolution has passed me by. What the bloody hell is Google Play for a start?

That’s the problem of ‘pay as you go’, of being a bit cheap and of living in rural Portugal I suppose…I just have let this whole thing happen and have remained faithful to my PC (I’m a PC and proud). I’m a blogger, facebooker, pintrester and tweeter, but mobile phones and tablets are a dead world to me. Oh dear, is this what it is like to be a ‘silver surfer’ next I’ll be saying things like ‘what’s a browser’ and ‘opps, I think I have deleted the internet’.

So high speed is coming….I just hope that I notice the difference and my life becomes enhanced! Now if I can just get that mobile phone to stop searching for a WiFi connection...

Comments

Building our Barrel Vault Wood Fired Oven

This is a short description of my barrel vault build that I have done here in Central Portugal. The final internal size is a 1m squared floor with a arch height of 50cm. I hope you enjoy and get some ideas from it. I wish to thank ukwoodfiredovenforum for their advice and support. • 1: First I dug out a hole in the flower bed, on top of the stone wall, where the oven was to be built • 2: Set up a form to pour in the concrete base • 3: Pour the concrete base, which was about 5-6 inches deep • 4: On top of the base I cast 4-5 inches of LECA (light weight expanded clay balls) mixed with cement to hold it's form • 5: Then I cast a 2-3 inch heat retaining base, to add to the thermal mass, using calcium aluminate cement with large grain sand, as a flat base for the hearth bricks to sit on • 6-8: I then dry laid the hearth bricks on a dry bed of fine sand and clay mixture, with th...

oh what a lovely bougainvillea

It was something I wanted to grow, a plant which would cover the wall, give shade, give colour and really stamp the fact we lived abroad. Bougainvillea. We have the other Mediterranean type of plants growing; we have olives in abundance, we have the grapes thriving, we have the figs establishing, but alas no bougainvillea. I looked up how to grow it and it says: Bougainvillea thrives in full sun. “At least 5 hours a day of direct sunlight is the minimal light required for good bloom. More hours of direct sun are better. Less than 5 hours and the plant may not bloom very well.” 5 hours of sun ‘check’, good light ‘check’, south facing ‘check’….but alas the Med we are not! This little peak of Central Portugal has cold air in winter (snow even), a vigorous breeze at dusk and is prone to a late frost. Our courtyard is just too exposed to the elements, there is no little ‘nook’ for a bougainvillea, there is no wall for it to climb...

We Three Kings

So, new year was fun. We popped to our Portuguese neighbours for one drink around 8pm (having already eaten and booked marked the evenings viewing on the TV). Peter got home at 4am! I was slightly more sedate and admitted defeat at 1am! The Portuguese do it so well you see. Rio and Philamina are our neighbours just over the road. Always really friendly we have been round for drinks with them a few times. Rio speaks Portuguese/Spanish with Peter and while Philamina does not speak English, she is wonderfully slow at speaking and I get about 60% of it! Typical Portuguese, they are warm and friendly, force feed you drinks and nice food, living proof of why we really love Portugal and the Portuguese people. This time, after disbelieving we were eating so early (8pm) they invited us round for a drink. Their children (about the same age as us) were staying along with their friends. Wonderfully they were young enough to know some English, which meant I could join in a lot more. When...

Helen and Peter in Portugal

Search This Blog