And on British TV - there's much concern to the English-speaking residents of San Miguel de Salinas, and indeed that million or so expats on the Costas - to use a general term, is the current and future analogue and digital transmission of UK and other English-speaking television channels. Our Rough Guide advice is "Do not worry!" And to enforce that advice consider a few things in the whole scenario.

A charming young Russian technician with perfect English told us," What's the problem the satellites are up in orbit beaming signals down and we are just down here picking them up…everyone in the world does that!" If we could all get it legally we would but we have to deceive and connive to achieve it, and we take the easy option and pay pirates. Whichever way we look at it we can't win and the Rough Guide generally thinks the pirates are doing us good service. But woe betides someone if the Queen Vic or indeed events like 2004 Olympic Games don't reach us safely in English. We believe that the Countries of the UK are the only ones in Europe that don't have a Channel for ex-patriots!

On the lighter side, with the average age of the expat communities of the Costas, if they did shut down English-speaking television, it's unlikely that there would be a significant baby boom, like nine months after the electricity was cut to New York. And whilst the whole issue is of little concern to our Spanish hosts they would have to wake up to demonstrations of Poll Tax proportions in Alicante and other regional capitals, and then the British Government would have to openly admit how many fully paid up expats have chosen to live in Spain. Diplomatic incidents are unlikely though…so let's not worry!

It is not a requirement to have a 1mb ADSL connection as VoIP (Voice over internet protocol) actually only uses about 34kbs to send and the same to receive a voice signal. So a full duplex (send and receive at the same time) connection would only equal 64kbs in theory. In this case you would only need a 512mb connection. As far as the headset/microphone & speakers are concerned spend the majority of your budget on a good quality microphone as you want the source of the signal to be high quality. You can buy some great value headsets that have built in microphones. Suppliers: Skype, MSN Messenger and now Google are jumping on the VoIP technology. But remember to get FREE calls, both parties must have the software installed at each end and PC have to be on (although some ADSL routers now provide ports for you to connect a VoIP phone handset without the need for the PC to be on) For a fee you can call from a VoIP connection to a any worldwide landline, current costs are cheap at around 1p per minute. VoIP is not a new technology and actually has been around for 10 years, I have just finished implementing a system for a London Publishing company which enables 7,500 staff worldwide to communicate internally for free! the voice quality is crystal clear. Any question I can answer please post on our forum or email

General Acknowledgement - in order to have relevant and interesting content on this website we do what every other publication does…we look for it in other publications. It's called plagiarism. We will always endeavor to acknowledge the source of information even though most of our content is in the public domain.