Wifi in rural areas?

[Gazpacho]

Fellow owners in rural Spain, please help! We have very erratic Wifi and I know that it is a must these days. A new router does not seem to have helped. It is with Movistar/Telefonica. Does anyone have any recommendations for really good broadband in rural areas?

[kevsboredagain]

What do you mean by erratic? The Wifi signal has nothing to do with the broadband as that part is only between you and your router. I assume you mean your actual broadband is not reliable?

What is your signal strength? Connection speed? Most routers can show this. Is there a fault on the line? You can ask to have this checked.

If you line is bad or you are are a long way from the exchange, changing ISP won't alter anything unless they are refusing to look into the problem. Your ISP knows how your line is performing. I too had unreliable internet in Spain. When it went offline for weeks at a time and they refused to help, I switched ISPs. The new one, direct-telecom.es, were great in looking at and fixing the line problem.

BTW the images on your home page are 15 times bigger than required, which is why the page loads so slowly. Many others on the rest of your website are similar.

[Gazpacho]

Yes it's the line that is the problem. The tecnico used to come out often, fix the line and then a few weeks later it would go again! Perhaps I should try a new ISP. I have wondered about it before but was unsure as I thought Telefonica owned the line and would provide better service. I had a terrible experience with Jazztel in the past which has made me wary of switching.
The large website images are a recent experiment. We thought the image quality would be better! They load fast on our own (UK) broadband but I think I will switch them back again. I did wonder whether since speeds are so much higher in the UK we could use larger images but maybe not!

[kevsboredagain]

Yes it's the line that is the problem. The tecnico used to come out often, fix the line and then a few weeks later it would go again! Perhaps I should try a new ISP. I have wondered about it before but was unsure as I thought Telefonica owned the line and would provide better service. I had a terrible experience with Jazztel in the past which has made me wary of switching.
The large website images are a recent experiment. We thought the image quality would be better! They load fast on our own (UK) broadband but I think I will switch them back again. I did wonder whether since speeds are so much higher in the UK we could use larger images but maybe not!

Sounds like you have a persistent problem so you have to nag them some more. It's often true that having an ISP that also owns the line makes things easier when there's a problem. I had the new ISP take over the line from Telefonica.

Example of your images.
1,024px × 768px (scaled to 250px × 200px)

The image downloaded is 1024 pixels but displayed at 250 pixels. Placing a huge image in there won't improve quality. The image should be 250 pixels is that is what you intend to display and doing this could even be better quality than allowing the browser to rescale.

I have a 50MB cable connection here and I noticed the images loading slowly. Once in cache, you won't notice.

[Casscat]

It depends upon where you are in Andalusia. I am in the campo and don't have a landline option so no 'broadband' per se. I have WiFi via Internet Directo and have been really happy with it. The range is great and guests can still use their devices while relaxing by the pool, but in the evenings they can stream films and live TV. Pretty good for a mobile network, and the other benefits are it's a rolling one month contract and only costs €19,90 per month. http://www.internetdirecto.com/ However their coverage area is currently really small

[Gazpacho]

Thanks so much Kev and Casscat for the suggestions - I shall look up the providers you mentioned!