Making phone calls in Spain

Hi,

When settling in Spain, one of the priorities is to be able to make phone calls.

How to proceed to get a landline installed in Spain?

What are the mobile operators?

What is your average monthly budget?

Thank you in advance for sharing your experience,

Maximilien

if you're just going to be here a short time, go to the corte ingles and buy a pre-pay cell phone and then recharge it in the ATM machine.  Since you don't pay if people call you, you call someone, hang up and then they call you back.
if you want to get the whole kit and caboodle, every company offers landline, dsl and cell phone package, you can just go online and look at the offers and decide which one is the best for you.  movistar and orange will offer you a gift (i got a 44 inch tv and a free samsung galaxy 2 (back in the day)) or you can get much more limited and cheaper services from yoigo or jazztel.  all the customer service sucks ass and they make no intents to keep you as a customer, so sometimes you can get a better deal by playing the "i signed up at movistar but now i'm going to orange so movistar will call and offer me a better rate and i will take that rate to orange" game, but that game sucks and works less and less than it did in the past.  good luck!  have fun!

Just get the Orange Plan "Mundo". That will be your best bet. If this happens to be a long-term stay it should work fine and you can always switch to a full-fledge contract (if you have residence papers).

There are several operators and all can be equally worthless. I have a service w/ Vodafone mainly for internet services. Movistar is the operator that has been around the longest and holds local monopoly so in terms of reliability this would be your best option. You can always find a 3rd party option for int'l calls.

Under any circumstance subscribe via phone or online. Do it in person!!!! Physically and bear in mind that only a few speak English so try to do it at a major store. English here can and will be a major communication issue unless you go w/ someone that speaks Spanish

I pay around 38 bucks for internet and landline - enough for me. Sky is the limit and once again, if your Spanish is an issue - beware - so try to keep things as simple as possible.

In 2015 nobody with any sense gets a lamdline. Its costly and the providers are inefficient.
There are a number of traditional big name mobile operators who are also expensive.
For overseas calls nuse lebara for pay as  you go. They are massively cheaper than the bug boys.

Hi,
Thanks for opening the thread,
I didn't find any prepaid offer for a minimum  of 1.5-2Gb data traffic of 3G/4G per month.
I used some such as "Yoigo" but it's quite slow on my phone, I don't know why. And limited to 1.2Gb.
I am interested by any feedback or data plan you found.

Also it is important to mention most if not all spanish people use Whatsapp so you don't need many minutes/sms.

We have an Orange package adsl and mobile deal. Unlimited internet adsl and mobile. 300 mins a month to international fixed lines from adsl and all unlimited national for mobile too.. max speed quoted 20Mb but usually 2-3 Mb, max ever seen around 6Mb. They now have a free customer line in English, a few months ago it was charged. total cost 54E pm. We also used Mundo when wife's family abroad had a prob with fixed line.
and Lebara again for int mobile payg. Our main interest was the 300 mins international and internet, so far I have not seen anything else worth changing for for our area, no fibre !

Don't kno much about speed connection. It may be subject to your physical location. Whatsapp is widely used by both locals and nkn-localsn

But you still need a data connection be it 3G or otherwise. LTE or so called 4G is almost non existant here due to the lack of fibre infastructure. I was responsible for the transmission to the LTE base stations in S Korea 3 years ago and we had 110,000. It should be noted also that we did not cover rural areas. Basically in the cities and towns there was a base station every 100m in order to guarantee >70MBts/S.

I moved to Movistar for the 10mb internet speed, about €46 a month. Never got as much as 2mb (Mojacar) and seldom use landline. Moving to the best "Internet only" service when my 2 year contract is finished!

I clicked on a Movistar ad to see if fibre was possible. after 2 minutes I received a barrage of calls over the next 30 mins. I received an offer over the phone which was very slightly better than Orange 500 mins free Int calls as against the 300 with Orange. I asked the guy to confirm via email or snail mail.and he said that it was not possible so he got a Nada and grazia a dios.

Moderated by kenjee 8 years ago
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Hey Frankkane,
What do you do with 2MB/s may dial-up con eso me limpio el XXX.
When I moved to malaga can I ask the amigos neighbors to see what they have would that be possible?
Please response I need a minimum of 12 MB/s .
Any toughs?

Walter

Walter,
You definitely need a fibre connection. check out the maps showing the coverage areas city centres should be OK!  Malaga Must be good?? We are supposed to have 20MBts/s but it varies from 600K to 1.8M. A few years ago it reached 5.6M now in the summer here it maxes at 500K.  If it is for a business then the situation is different and you can get anything if you pay for it eg. dedicated lines be it radio or fibre with guaranteed minimum performance up to GBts/s.

I didn't use landline at all (though there was a phone at home (Barcelona) installed by my landlord).

For mobile phone, I bought HOLIDAY from ORANGE. It was quite cheap and actually you can change the plan to other cheaper plans online on their website. It was around 9€ for 2GB data. Usually I topped up my card every month and a half. It was more than enough for me (as a student).

However, one major problem was - the reception dropped dramatically when I was on metro or when I was somewhere packed with people.