Benidorm now sits alongside London and Paris as being one of the few European destinations to have "small cell" 4G antennas installed.
In fact, Benidorm is the first city across the whole of Spain to benefit from this new technology... even ahead of Madrid and Barcelona!
Network meltdown in Benidorm
With the mass arrival of holiday makers to the resort and the trend of social media sites such as Instgram, Whatsup and FaceBook, phone networks have been experiencing blackout due to overload! Over the Semana Santa (Easter) week, the same happened and it caused many business untold problems, such as difficulty connecting to the credit and debit card system. To address the issue, Benidorm Council contacted all the mobile phone suppliers to come up with a solution – and Telefonica came to the rescue.
Great investment for Benidorm
The company has invested 120,000€ to install 16 antennas along a 5km stretch of the Levante and Poniente beaches, which will increase the maximum speed of the 4G mobile network. Each antenna has a coverage radius of 600 metres, so in addition to the beaches, the surrounding areas signal will also strengthen – much needed in the Old Town area.
The boxes have been attached high up on lamp posts along the promenade and yesterday the Mayor, Agustin Navarro attended the installation of the devices – which should be switched on next week. Deputy Gema Amor, Jose Manuel de Arco – Director of Public Administration for Telefonica in Valencia and other Council representatives, accompanied him. 95% of the network traffic corresponds to the transmission of data, which when the population trebles such as over the Summer period, it causes blackouts of coverage. These "small cells", which are used to increase and strengthen network capacity, should quadruple the speed and alleviate the problem.
Free charging facilities on Benidorm beaches
I attended the presentation yesterday and even made it onto the Spanish paper "Diario Informacion" - using my iPad next to one of the antennas!
Last week another new service was introduced on the Levante and Poniente beaches – at the biblioplayas (libraries). Users can now recharge their mobile phones, using a FREE charging service provided by the Council, which can recharge up to 6 mobiles at a time in half an hour.
