Prepaid 3G in Barcelona (Vodafone)
I visited Barcelona for the first time ever a couple weeks ago.
As usual, I wanted to stay connected there as well so I had planned on obtaining a local prepaid SIM card with a data plan. I didn't do much research in advance, I just searched for information during the flight (thanks to Norwegian Airlines for the in-flight Wi-Fi!) and saw that Vodafone has simple prepaid packages.
Obtaining and activation of the SIM was alot easier than expected, Vodafone has several stores in downtown Barcelona, I visited the one near the Urquinaona square/subway station. The clerk spoke fluent English and sorted me out in less than 5 minutes. A thing to note is that in Spain they register prepaid mobile users, so a passport is needed.
I bought a 500mb package which was priced at 8 euros including the SIM card. Thinking about it afterwards a 1GB one (priced at 12 euros) would've been better as I found out that Google+ consumes a lot of bandwidth when the automatic backing up of photos is switched on (my phone has an 18 mpix camera so the photos become pretty big), this is something that can be solved by changing the settings so that photos are only backed up when on Wi-Fi. The data connection quality was a definite positive surprise, as an elitistic North European one is accustomed to the idea of mobile data sucking outside of North Europe, but Vodafone really delivered. I didn't do any exact tests on bandwidth or latency, but in normal usage it was smooth enough. Even HSDPA+ network was available pretty often. The connection did occasionally cut for 1-3 seconds but it didn't disturb me as I don't watch/listen streamed content on my phone.
Speaking of wireless technologies, to my surprise pretty much all vending machines at subway stations were equipped with contactless payment card readers (Visa Paywave and MasterCard's equivalent product, can't remember the name now). My day job involves payment cards and payment terminals so it was cool to see that they're so much ahead of us, namely in Finland the first attended payment terminals with support for contactless cards weren't introduced to the market until 5 months ago (May 2013), with unattended terminals probably coming sometime during the second half of 2014. Too bad that I didn't have a Visa Paywave -enabled card to test it.
Posted via m.livejournal.com.
As usual, I wanted to stay connected there as well so I had planned on obtaining a local prepaid SIM card with a data plan. I didn't do much research in advance, I just searched for information during the flight (thanks to Norwegian Airlines for the in-flight Wi-Fi!) and saw that Vodafone has simple prepaid packages.
Obtaining and activation of the SIM was alot easier than expected, Vodafone has several stores in downtown Barcelona, I visited the one near the Urquinaona square/subway station. The clerk spoke fluent English and sorted me out in less than 5 minutes. A thing to note is that in Spain they register prepaid mobile users, so a passport is needed.
I bought a 500mb package which was priced at 8 euros including the SIM card. Thinking about it afterwards a 1GB one (priced at 12 euros) would've been better as I found out that Google+ consumes a lot of bandwidth when the automatic backing up of photos is switched on (my phone has an 18 mpix camera so the photos become pretty big), this is something that can be solved by changing the settings so that photos are only backed up when on Wi-Fi. The data connection quality was a definite positive surprise, as an elitistic North European one is accustomed to the idea of mobile data sucking outside of North Europe, but Vodafone really delivered. I didn't do any exact tests on bandwidth or latency, but in normal usage it was smooth enough. Even HSDPA+ network was available pretty often. The connection did occasionally cut for 1-3 seconds but it didn't disturb me as I don't watch/listen streamed content on my phone.
Speaking of wireless technologies, to my surprise pretty much all vending machines at subway stations were equipped with contactless payment card readers (Visa Paywave and MasterCard's equivalent product, can't remember the name now). My day job involves payment cards and payment terminals so it was cool to see that they're so much ahead of us, namely in Finland the first attended payment terminals with support for contactless cards weren't introduced to the market until 5 months ago (May 2013), with unattended terminals probably coming sometime during the second half of 2014. Too bad that I didn't have a Visa Paywave -enabled card to test it.
Posted via m.livejournal.com.