Italy Breaks Your Heart

First topic message reminder :

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/opinion/sunday/bruni-italy-breaks-your-heart.html?_r=0

Despite the headline and several paragraphs of gloom, the odd hint of hopeful anticipation seems to peek through the writing.

I'm afraid our experience accords with Flip's and stevewmonkseaton's.  I was amazed when our bank started online banking because in all other situations Italians seemed to only do business by fax.  In fact for several years - until about 3 or 4 years ago, I think - we had to send a fax to our bank to authorise payments if we weren't in the country.  

But even now, despite saying that an organisation has email, I've yet to receive an email response to anything I've ever asked.  This even applied to the IT company setting up our wi-fi.  They would receive and even read my emails but never respond to my questions.  When I rang them up (with my mangled italian) they would remember that I wrote to them but never responded by email.  This happened on more than one occasion. V strange for a computer company.  

That said, our water company have started to email us general notes such as the dates of the next bolletino etc.  By contrast, I find it hard to get any UK company to stop sending me emails.

Obviously, we have been very lucky... at least up to now. And Carciofo, I fully sympathise with your comment about unwanted emails... to delete them is a full time job!!!

I agree that they are quite behind the times with technology in many of the businesses, but are slowly catching up. Fax was always the favourite when we came here 8 years ago. The telecoms companies are still way behind with broadband speeds.
Asked a telecom italia guy who was working outside one day, when they would get the broadband speeds faster in the area and he just laughed. Says it all.

Geo, we struggled fro years on TI so called ADSL broadband, and never got more than 0.5Meg service, mainly due to the distance from the exchange. We now use CloudItalia (Eutelia) with a square dish, and weather permitting always get around 6meg but even in heavy rain we always get above 1meg.

Flip wrote:... We now use CloudItalia (Eutelia) with a square dish, and weather permitting always get around 6meg but even in heavy rain we always get above 1meg.

Actually in that regard, we probably get better speeds in Italy than in London.   I've always assumed that, being out in the country, there are not enough people to drag the speeds down.

I'm afraid that after reading all your posts, I am totally confused. Up to now, I was perfectly happy with my MIFI, the TIM SIM card that I top up for the time of my stay in Italy. Now I am going to be miserable checking speeds, etc. I guess that ignorance is a blessing 

Flip wrote:Geo, we struggled fro years on TI so called ADSL broadband, and never got more than 0.5Meg service, mainly due to the distance from the exchange. We now use CloudItalia (Eutelia) with a square dish, and weather permitting always get around 6meg but even in heavy rain we always get above 1meg.

I seem to get over 1.0meg download as a average and around 0.25 on upload with TI. As I do not need high download speeds it does not worry me that much. We are quite some distance from the exchange and on a white road.
I found that the site for watching the TV series that you recommended has very little or no buffering, so no problem.

ADSL will always depend on the distance from the exchange, how up to date that exchange is and linked, how good the copper cable is and so on... A little bit more on track of the OP, I think it is more difficult here in Italy for ADSL as the terrain makes it hard to improve things.. I've not used ADSL here in Italy, do they use microfilters? In rural areas I'm sure it will be cr@p (as it would be in any country), unless you happen to live next door to an exchange. Use of mobile broadband is/has improved in Italy in the 4 years or so we have been here and I think is the medium term way forward... Just because you did not have access last month does not mean it won't be there now... Cheap check is a mobile phone that picks up 3/4g signal and tells you how good it is... Ours, here, using WIND is 90-95% of the time better than our valley access in the UK. However we don't stream TV and/or download anything large...