The younger ones will be surprised, but there was a time when The internet connection proposal that ADSL offered us put a big smile on our face too much. Until the advent of this type of connectivity, the average user had to resort to dial-up access to networks via a router with the limitations this posed, while a lucky few (and of course the rich) could afford extreme speeds. ISDN access.

Already in 1985, Telefónica told us about a surprising future and marked the year 2000 as a key date for it. Of course, the Internet came earlier, access to the network networks began to reach many households thanks to the telephone. access to networks during the second half of the nineties. But it is true that Telefónica was preparing something very special for such an important date. And so with little notice During 1999, the first ADSL connections began to be installed.

This requires a bit of context for those who didn’t experience those times. Dial-up access to the network required the use of a modem connected to a computer and a telephone line. So when we wanted to connect to the internet, the operating system “phoned” the ISP number of our choosing (in which we of course “talked” to the modem at the other end of the line to establish a connection and keep it active).

This means that to connect to the Internet it was necessary to pay a phone call and an ISP fee, although it is true that InfoVía Plus came in 1999 (it is better not to talk about InfoVia, it launched three years earlier) and that we had a surprising emergence of providers free internet access. Of course, even under these circumstances, telephone access to networks still had two main limitations: Its maximum speed was 56 kbps (and was virtually impossible to access in the real world) and that when we were connected to the internet it was impossible to make and receive calls. And we are talking about the end of the 1990s, when mobile phones started to gain ground, but landlines were still more than predominant.

Then came the year 2000, a milestone that many of us were waiting for, which, despite many fears in this regard, did not end all computing infrastructures due to the Y2K effect. even though it was already clear that the future of connectivity was in fiberADSL began to be deployed, which represented a major improvement in connectivity and which, a key factor in its great success, could be offered over Telefónica’s vast metallic network.

So, as you can see in the video above, The service went on sale with download speeds of up to 2 Mbps, although the most affordable offer for ordinary mortals (at 9,300 pesetas per month plus installation and ADSL router) was the one offering 256 kbps download and 128 kbps upload. Let’s not be fooled, it was an expensive service, with entry costs of more than 55,000 pesetas, so if we take into account inflation and of course the change to the euro, we are talking about a monthly fee close to 100,- euros, in addition to the initial costs (registration, installation and ADLS modem) in the amount of more than 575 euros.

Liberalization of the telecommunications market led to the arrival of other operators, which spurred competition and led to a substantial drop in prices, which saw ADSL connectivity become a thing of the past, making dial-up access to networks a thing of the past. And it stayed that way for years, connections with ever more competitive prices, ever higher speeds (at least in theory) and the future that Telefónica predicted in 1985 is becoming the present.

However, and as I mentioned before, we all knew that the future was in fiber. It is not for nothing that Spain was the first European country to introduce ADSL, but this was mainly due to the fact that our optical infrastructure was far behind that of our European neighbours. however this was about to changeboth with the help of Telefónica and other private telecommunications, which also began to cable a large part of the map.

And so, while ADSL was finishing beating copper (pun intended) with “traditional” dial-up connections, Telefónica has started testing its optical connection, originally only in a small part of Madrid, a service that it started to offer generally (albeit with a very limited geographical reach) in 2008. And yes, in the meantime other telecoms, like ONO, did their thing in the territories where they operated and added that Telefónica also offered other operators to “resell” their own version of optical connectivity based on Telefónica’s network. Of course, with some important limitations that made the proposal unattractive to third parties.

The last decade has been without a doubt about the large deployment of optical networks in Spain, so that if at the beginning its geographical reach was terribly limited, by the end it already reached a large part of the territory. Attention, a large part, not all, and even currently, there are locations where the fiber cannot reach, and what is worse, it is not even planned for the future. In the map below, which includes data from 2022, you can see the geographic reach of 1 Gbps broadband, according to data collected by the Ministry of Economy and Digital Transformation. If you want more information, you can view other maps at this link.

Goodbye ADSL

So at this point Telefónica is about to switch off metallic exchanges, which means the end of ADSLand the scheduled date of said outage is very close because it will happen next April 19. It is an outage that has already been planned and announced in advance by the telco, which says it has informed users still using ADSL and copper-based phones about the infrastructure downfall. The infrastructure, which, let’s recall, began to be deployed in 1924, i.e. 100 years ago, when Telefónica was born.

Now, although for many of us ADSL (and other variants of xDSL) sounds like a thing of the past, in reality the number of users of the same in Spain is certainly much higher than you imagine. According to data from the CNMC (Commission for National Markets and Economic Competition) At the end of January 2024, around 444,000 connections of this type were still active with us.compared to 1,462,000 mixed connections (mostly fibre-based but with some copper added) and almost 15 million FTTH (fibre to the home) connections.

In a future article we will look at alternatives for users who will be affected by the ADSL outagealthough we must bear in mind that none of them today offer the speed that fiber optics provides, and therefore, even if it is not profitable, the necessary measures should be taken, both by public authorities and by telecommunications. digital disconnection, which de facto means the impossibility of counting on this type of connectivity.

I agree, it is true that some alternatives can provide ADSL-like connectivity, but the digitization of both the public and private sectors has made the dependence we have on internet connectivity much greater than we could previously measure. decades, not to mention the glory days of ADSL. It is true that a good internet connection is not a guarantee that everything will go well, but we can confirm that Limited internet connection is a big handicap these days.

Is the ADSL outage affecting you? If so, we’d love to hear your story and share it in the comments.