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Getting Wired in PV

Bienvenido, loyal reader.  Please join Bruce and Mary as they scout the market and finally get their own internet.

It’s kind of embarrassing to admit, but I think we have finally grown up, here in Puerto Vallarta. We feel a little like young twenty-somethings who finally got booted out of their parents’ basement. When we ran away to Mexico nearly five years ago, we did so with no plan really, other than some vague idea of owning and operating a B&B. And when that showed itself to be one of the worst ideas of the plenty of bad ones that we have had, serendipity stepped in. Long story short, we found ourselves with internet jobs and living in beautiful houses… for free, we had become house-sitters!  Now of course there were responsibilities and obligations but bottom line was, everything was provided for us… including internet. Now let’s fast forward. After leaving our parents’ basement in Merida we came to PV where (excluding our first three months in Mexico) we were paying rent for the first time, and CFE, the electric bill. But we were still relying upon our landlady’s internet, one floor down. Well that worked ok but when one of the grandkids unplugged the router for about the 4th time, during our work shifts, of course, we felt it was time to grow all the way up and get our own internet.

Here’s Mary at the Telecable Office on Av. Columbia, entre Calles Guatelmala y Brasilia. We’d done our research and it had come down to Telmex’s Infinitum or Telecable and tacaño that I am, we chose to check out the cheaper service, Telecable.

This is the poster we see as we walk in the door. The least expensive service got cheaper yet!

We wait in line with folks who are here to pay their bill and finally we are at the front of the queue. Concepcion is very helpful in explaining the options and luckily Mary’s command of the language is up to par because Concepcion does not have much Ingles. Once we understand our options we look at each other and I say, “Let’s just do it, it will be our Christmas present to each other.”  Or as mija Helen said, addressing our chancy Skype calls on the borrowed internet, “Let’s call it a Christmas present to all of us.” We sign up for the basic TV package (we would have preferred no TV, but that is not an option) and the basic 5Mbps internet, they do have broadband available up to 15Mb. We pay 300P cash for the installation and we do take advantage of the 14mo. for 12mo. promotion and are quite happy that we can use our American Capital One card (the only CC that we know of that does not charge a 3% international transaction fee) for payment. The 14 months of service comes to 5212P, or $407.90 on our statement. Que Bueno!

It’s four days later and the installers have come and boy do they hammer us to upgrade our TV from the basic package, all in Espanol. After about 10 minutes of saying no, they offer a bajo mano, under the table deal. For 300P cash, to them, we can get the biggest TV package with tons of English language channels, forever. We still say no.Our coax cable is strung from yonder rats’ nest…

And secured here, at the corner of our front patio.

Finally the cable is brought into the house.

We have had Telecable for about three weeks now and here are our observations: We are glad we have the TV for one reason – we have started watching a telenovela, soap opera, daily to improve our Spanish. Ours is Para Volver a Amar, To Love Again. And yours is? Come clean now! As far as the internet is concerned we’re not terribly impressed so far. According to Speed Test they do deliver the 5Mb promised, quintupling our speed from the landlady’s internet, but we have to reset the router about every other day. It’s kind of a pain in the butt,  switching to our back-up while waiting for the reset which it has done every time except once, a Sunday, when it was down for most of the day. We figured it must have been a global outage as all their phone lines were tied up the whole time. So, based upon our limited experience thus far, if we did not have the landlady’s internet for backup we would pay the extra for Infinitum’s reliability, as we make our living online. Except for the grand-kids unplugging the modem, we had not had one Infinitum outage since the landlady’s phone lines were upgraded 4 months ago. But having said all that, if we did not work online, tacaño that I am, we would opt for Telecable.

Thanks for visiting, gentle reader. Bruce and Mary would love comentarios on this subject or any subject and promise to acknowledge all in “real time”, as they used to say in Bruce’s old life. Hasta proximo Domingo!

January 20, 2013 · Bruce · 13 Comments
Posted in: Life in Puerto Vallarta

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