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I am still setting up the website, the links will start working around sunday evening of June 5th 2022. Until then you can email me at ( morphle at ziggo dot nl
by morphle 4y ago
I am still setting up the website, the links will start working around sunday evening of June 5th 2022. Until then you can email me at ( morphle at ziggo dot nl ).
I am making it a community site, with a HN type discussion forum and video blog hosting.
Fiber internet outside of a town is very much a problem in Spain! Electricity hookup (its called 'Solar' in Spanish) is almost impossible because you first need building and living permits and you simply will never ever get one.
In Portugal its usually even harder. Laws are different in Arizona but still a big problem. You might need permission from the local tribe, or bridge a few hundred miles with microwave dishes as a backup to your Starlink. Having reliable electricity at night requires inverters and batteries that are not for sale yet, they must be custom built. And then you still need road access to your cheap rural land...
These are the reasons my company needs to help you find suitable land, get the permits and build your tiny house, because you can not do all that on your own, especially the electricity, water and internet you need for remote work.
First you need a community of rural land owners to fund the (minimal $25K) infrastructure build out .
My company Fiberhood sets up a 300 Mbps Starlink Premium for Business ($9000 for the first year) on your land with 4G backup antennes and then builds a local fiber network to all the farms in the neighbourhood. After 12 months we hook up the fiber to the fiber backbone 100 km away, then you get 10 Gbps for around $99 per month on your rural land, fit for running a remote business.
As a Spaniard you point out the BS the municipalities (Ajuntamente) throw at you about permits. Don't forget the regional governments, the tax department, the electricity companies, etc. All over Europe this is a problem, but rural Spain and Portugal are especially difficult. This is why we only offer off-grid living in a few dozen locations this year. Only these locations where we have already managed to convince the local governments to give us permission, or place where we have found legal loopholes in the law. One example I can give is land in a nature reserve where you will never get a building permit for any house. But you are allowed to park a truck in that forest and live in it.
In other places we get permits on our land because we build infrastructure to the local town as well. But you alone would never get that building or living permit, ever.
You need to befriend the local technical architect and the mayor, buy them a couple of beers and have you children play soccer with them for a year before they will even listen to your building proposals that took you $5000 to draw up by another technical architect you hire. And it would still take a few years to get the 11 or so permits you need.
We figure all this out for you, build the infrastucture and make a liveable house. You can off course do some of that work yourself (on top of your remote work you also do) but you still need our help in the first 2 years with permits and infrastructure.
- CommieBobDole 4y ago> Electricity hookup (its called 'Solar' in Spanish) is almost impossible because you first need building and living permits and you simply will never ever get one. Interesting. Is this an intentional thing i.e."We don't want people to live outside of towns so we're not going to issue any occupancy permits", or a bureaucratic incompetence/corruption thing?
- morphle 4y agoYes, its all intentional, many laws. On top of that also bureaucratic hurdles, widespread incompetence and a little corruption. But our company gradually learned the solutions with the help of many Spanish and Portugese locals and high fees for the local lawyers and technical architects. There are millions of dwellings in Spain and Portugal built without permits. Nowadays they are demolished quickly if they find out. Buying the older illegal houses is also dangerous (and the reason so many foreigners are scammed bying their dream property). For example, you can not build on rural land outside of town, not on farm land or on nature reserves. The government owns the water, you can't just digg a well. You can only get permission to build a tool shed in some areas if you own at least 5000m2. The police will evict you if you start building or living on your land, tipped off by the neighbours who don't like foreigners or competition from your farm. If you rent out your house to tourist, you'll need a permit and pay more taxes. And anything is slow, you'll run out of money much quicker than the government runs out of ways to delay you. Watch the 17 years of Dutch episodes (thru a dutch VPN) of "Ik Vertrek" for all the horror stories of people buying land or houses in Europe and losing all their money.
- spaniard89277 4y agoI understand your struggles, but the way the "system" is set up in Spain, this isn't going to change soon. In most small municipalities the people in charge have no idea what are they doing, and most of them don't get any money for it, so it's just the local guy who likes to be known or has some personal interests, and maybe, sometimes, someone that does it for the altruism. Maybe I would say that for ISPs there are plenty in rural Spain happy to lay fiber if you can assure them enough recurring revenue. Even with the not so small ones like Adamo you have a chance of getting fiber laid.