Sequel to 2024

 

The New Digital Reality of Portugal

For as long as I can remember, Portugal's telecom landscape has been dominated by 3 big providers that held complete control over our market until very recently: Vodafone, MEO (formerly known as TMN) and NOS (formerly known as Optimus).

These companies, which operate both landline and mobile services, have long operated like a cartel in our market - colluding together in order to provide the worst possible service for the highest possible price, always moving in unison.

The terrible deals they were providing people became obvious whenever we left the country to visit for example our neighbors in Spain, who have since long had far better deals compared to what we had available to us here in Portugal.

Our price per gigabyte of data was one of the very worst of Europe, and Portugal was one of the last countries to adopt the new 5G mobile technology.

However, all this is changing right now. After decades of cartel from this trio, a new company has recently decided to enter the market completely independently, one that had already garnered fame in other countries of Europe for their great value services.

This new company that is now entering our country is called DIGI (https://www.digi.pt), and as far as I know they originate from Romania.

We have known for over a year now that DIGI was coming to Portugal, and many people looked at their arrival with great hopes that things would be changing in our stagnant telecom market. But only recently have their prices been revealed.

It truly became a new digital revolution for Portugal. DIGI offered prices that far outclassed anything the cartel trio had been offering in our country. Prices and service that are far fairer and far more in line with our neighbors in Spain. Everybody who was well informed about tech wanted to switch over to DIGI, the new company.

This has inevitably forced the cartel trio to change overnight however, to defend their position in the market. After all, they couldn't let themselves lose all of their customers to the newcomer. Benefits are already being felt by all the population of the country.

Overnight my tariff with Vodafone has QUADRUPLED in data capacity for no additional price, that's 4 times fold. No longer was I limited to 50GB for €3.5 per week, now I have 201GB for the same price.

But there's even more impressive changes from other carriers. Vi's plan had 10GB of base data for €10 a month. Although he is now back at Brazil, we still caught his data plan changing overnight, from 10GB to UNLIMITED.

Not only that, new costumers weren't even paying €10 a month for that anymore, they were paying €7 per month for unlimited data and 5000 minutes/sms, a deal that was previously absolutely unthinkable - yet one which DIGI is also offering themselves as well.

And you know, networking can be really fun to play and experiment with! So I devised a plan. I ordered for myself the "4G CPE 5" router from Huawei and ordered one of those new €7 unlimited data plan SIM cards. I challenged myself to live for 1 month with a €7 unlimited plan, to find out how challenging it would be. Abandon my gigabit fiber connection for a while.

Technically the plan would be compatible with 5G by the way, it's just that 5G home routers are still incredibly expensive and I didn't want to be spending that much money for this experiment.

It's been now just over 3 days since I started this experiment and I manage to spend just over 600GB of mobile data with my brand new router. Amazing. So far the only bad things are that torrents are throttled and the whole connection in general gets throttled if I download more than about 7GB in a row at maximum speed, from a maximum of 140Mbps to roughly 30Mbps, which all things considered is not too shabby.

If you control your speed by yourself and prevent yourself from using more than roughly 75Mbps you don't even get hit by throttling, and the torrent problem can easily be solved by using a VPN.

For me the only real difficulty is the upload speed, since I like to post heavy uploads for everyone at the Zoo Therian Den Media channel. 4G upload is not fantastic for that, but it kinda works... provided I have a lot of patience with it.

Game downloads are fine, I can wait a bit longer. And online gaming generally works fine too! It's not exactly as stable as playing over fiber connection, but it's generally also not too shabby. Wouldn't recommend playing PvP games over 4G too much though.

In the end, it's just great to see how new competition is breathing life into a stagnant telecom market, and helping all the people greatly along with it. If you have to live in a capitalistic society... may at least competition be abundant! Competition is fantastic for all the people.

That's all for today. Thanks for reading!
Your friend
- RoxanaTheWolf

 PS: I will now start posting like this as well, occasionally. It's just faster and easier sometimes!

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