How Much Does 10Gbps Fiber Cost in Spain? Billions. Also €25/Month.

And how Spain built one of the best fiber-optic networks in the world.

Part of Bebop Libre’s Spainfrastructure series. 🚆

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Photo by Javier Pérez Montes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, Cropped

When the technician arrived, I was doubtful. His signal tester glowed red. A Sith lightsaber tempting me to the Dark Side.

But after he made a couple trips between the telecommunications room and an exposed wire cabinet in my apartment: flashes of Mean Green Yoda energy. The tech literally ran a line to my unit, by himself, in less than twenty minutes.

The result? 10Gbps symmetrical fiber internet for €25 per month.

Before I explain what that means, let me first say this moment marked the first in my American life in which I benefited from telecom infrastructure without being waterboarded — by moving from America to Spain. In celebration, the first thing I did with my internet connection was order a phat doner kebab. Doners are serious business in Europe. The delivery fee and cost of the meal were a pittance compared to what I’d have paid in America for a less appetizing meal. In literally ten minutes, some man on a bike handed over my hot doner in a bolsa.

Did you know? Bolsa is Spanish for “bag,” something you’ll be asked about in any grocery checkout line after you move to Spain for high-speed internet.

If you’re wondering, wait, you had your food prepared and delivered in ten minutes?, yes, welcome to Things Not Sucking All the Time, a through line to be explored by various pieces of this publication which I call Bebop Libre. Subscribe for more America-to-Spain culture shock relief.

Let’s back up, because I forgot something. This wasn’t the first time I benefited from Spanish telecom infrastructure… For €10 per month, I had signed up for a mobile plan with unlimited calls (anywhere in the EU) and 64GB of data, meaning in the interim of days waiting for the fiber installation, I could semi-carelessly use my phone as a hotspot for other devices, listen to music, watch videos, and write my observations in the cloud. Not the best plan out there, but it was the most expedient for me at the time.

You can’t go too crazy with 64GB, but, for comparison, I only had 4GB in America. What manner of absolute horseshit is that?

My rant you may as well read in Bernie Sanders’ voice: The US is one of the richest countries in the world, and for whose benefit? If Americans knew what their government could do for them, you know, the government they pay for — the government that is supposed to represent We the People — who started the whole thing over “no taxation without representation” in regard to tea shipments, TEA SHIPMENTS… well, then a friendly conversation about reforming infrastructure wouldn’t be an unwelcome sequel.

Do I allege Spain has a perfect system?

No, but don’t let anyone distract from Spain having done an exceptional job with their internet situation when others haven’t.

While I acknowledge America has an expanding fiber network, the coverage is not great. It’s expensive too, and I say that without accounting for the hundreds of billions of dollars(!!!) telecom companies have swindled from loyal patrons and taxpayers since the 90s for little-to-nothing in return.¹ Instead of any level of government applying price controls, we American consumers have been charged millions of retirement funds’ worth of arbitrary fees for receiving the worst customer support in the world. And how can any of us ignore the monthly bill documenting this extortion and its flagrant price hikes that have been out-inflating inflation by an order of magnitude for decades now?

This is in contrast to Spain, which through regulation ensured billions of euros were reinvested into telecom infrastructure instead of executive pockets, mostly.

What does a fuckload mean to you?

Something that is hammered into a nerd who studies computer science as I did is there are eight bits (basically on/off switches) in a byte. This is true whether the bits are Spanish or American. In decimal representation (as opposed to binary),² there are 1000 bytes in a kilobyte; 1000 kilobytes in a megabyte; and 1000 megabytes in a gigabyte. How much data can transmit through a medium per unit time is called bandwidth. (Please don’t leave.) My internet connection’s bandwidth was now one gigabyte per second. That’s eight gigabits of throughput after overhead on what’s marketed as a “10-gig” plan. And remember it’s “symmetrical,” meaning my network could send up to eight billion bits per second, and receive up to eight billion bits per second, simultaneously.

In the words of a layperson, a fuckload.

Regarding my cheap fiber, the stereotypical American response to what may be perceived as jovial gloating (and that’s what I’m doing, by the way) is envy. But don’t brandish your semi-automatic rifle and shoot me dead yet. Don’t run me over with your SUV that can fit less stuff in it than a 1990s town car, for some reason. Don’t make healthcare so unaffordable that I skip my annual checkup. Take a deep breath, because I’d like to serenade you with something called information.

When confronted with such things, some Americans have been preconditioned to short-circuit their prefrontal cortex with a frothy and engorged amygdala to retort that the US has effectively subsidized the defense of the EU, and that’s why [insert EU member state here] has awesome [insert public good here].

But that’d be historically inaccurate, and less weird than what actually happened. And America had something to do with it!

Spanish telecom-onomics through the ages.

Compañía Telefónica Nacional de España was founded as a private company in 1924 during the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Telefónica still constructs and maintains manholes, ducts, poles, and building access. Today, such pathways are leased to various internet service providers (ISPs) who install fiber-optic cables within the preexisting routes.³ By way of the founding Behn brothers’ sexual business partnerships, the main shareholder of Telefónica was initially an American one called the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT).⁴

The Rivera regime conceded the private monopoly to ITT in classic heavyhanded dictatorial fashion, as Telefónica urgently solved an infrastructure crisis. Plus, its founding as a nominally “Spanish” company kept the protectionists at bay.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Is this asshole suggesting the answer to the problem of fiber in America is a military dictatorship allowing the creation of a private monopoly?”

Uh… well, I mean, uh, after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Colonel Sosthenes Behn (one of the two brothers — the other died in 1933⁵) would be counted among Hitler’s early American visitors. For the succeeding Francisco Franco regime in Spain, ITT became radioactive because it was an American company with German subsidiaries that had profited from Nazi rearmament contracts. That’s why in 1945 the regime acquired the vast majority of share capital in Telefónica, essentially nationalizing it in a bid to avoid consequences from the Allies while appealing to the Francoists’ desire to project economic independence (“autarky”).⁶

“Let me get this straight,” you’re wondering, “is this fool saying we should nationalize a private monopoly like Comcast with a fascist takeover?”

The tangent line we’re riding isn’t as close to validating horseshoe theory as it would appear. As we fast-forward, it’s clear the Franco years were slow at the outset because of the very civil war Franco instigated and tore apart the country over. The ensuing years of hunger (años de hambre)⁷ were caused by his destructive actions and divisive rhetoric which included open support of the Axis Powers.⁸ The completely avoidable ensuing depression dragged down industrial entities, including Telefónica — until everything changed.

Franco’s regime hesitantly abandoned autarky with the passage of the Stabilization Plan of 1959,⁹ a series of reforms set to take advantage of cooled international relations, once again infusing foreign capital into Spain by the early 60s. Some refer to this period, which lasted until 1974, as the Spanish miracle (el milagro español). That’s like setting one’s home ablaze and then claiming a miracle occurred after the smoke naturally clears. Is it so miraculous to enjoy the same post-WW2 boom the rest of the West had been benefiting from for quite some time? It’s more objective to refer to this as Spain’s period of developmentalism (desarrollismo), emphasizing policy change.¹⁰

“So capitalism saved Spain and Telefónica?”

The situation was nuanced: market liberalization was better than Franco’s failed attempt at autarky, but it allowed capitalists, American and European, to exploit a national growth opportunity on terms that would’ve been far more amenable to Spaniards themselves had Franco not taken power. Of course the capital injection provided significant opportunity to those who migrated to urban areas, but at the cost of 1) concentrating wealth, 2) hollowing out rural Spain, and 3) initially causing an economic recession.¹¹

Developmentalism could only indirectly stimulate Telefónica as it had not been open to world markets. The transition government spanning between Franco’s death in November 1975 and 1977 (when Spain held its first free elections since 1936), had little impact on Telefónica. Nor did the subsequent center-right transitional coalition.

To date, the most profound transformation of Telefónica began in 1982 when social democrats took the helm. Through 1996, they extensively privatized Telefónica.¹² I repeat: the people in the same approximate political category as Bernie Sanders privatized Telefónica in the pursuit of economic integration with the rest of Europe. Having reduced the government to a minority stake in the entity, the stage was set for market-driven change to dominate. But why didn’t Telefónica end up like that one American telecom monopoly everyone hates? You know which one I’m talking about.

That’s another distinct difference: regulation to promote competition.

In America, politicians with a paper trail of being paid off by monopolies tell us regulation is bad for competition. Huh, can’t imagine why.

Since 1996, alternating right and left governments in Spain kept the pressure on Telefónica so it couldn’t maximally abuse its monopoly status, allowing other operators to use its infrastructure at set rates, among other obligations.¹³ Tight regulation of the monopoly, with strategic loosening over time as competitors gained ground, led to Spain’s fiber boom that gained serious momentum around 2013. Thus, the reason my internet connection now kicks ass is because of the mixed economy, where anti-monopoly laws, labor, and consumer action stifle the things Karl Marx predicted would happen over two hundred fucking years ago.

Spain has one of the best fiber-optic networks in the entire world.

Compared to the rest of the EU, Spain’s fiber-optic progress was laggard until Telefónica began offering multi-service packages in 2012. To do this well amidst competition, the company knew how best to corner the market: fiber-optic cables. Cables made of glass fibers that can convey data near the speed of light. In 2013, private investment in fiber surged, and it didn’t stop there.¹⁴ Today, Spain has enough fiber-optic cable installed to go to the moon and back, I guesstimate.¹⁵

One could argue that of the EU member states, Romania has higher coverage (95.6% as of 2022), or that Portugal has a higher percentage of homes that use fiber, with a penetration rate of 81.95%. Still, Spain has the highest take-up rate at 91.03%, meaning of the homes that can use fiber, they almost always do.¹⁶ Moreover, Spain’s not just significantly larger than other member states with comparably great fiber infrastructure, but its geographic diversity is considerable. Spain is around 505,000km² by land area, whereas Romania has less than half that. Portugal has less than a fifth. Denmark, which has excellent fiber infrastructure, has about one-twelfth of Spain’s area.¹⁷

Considering infrastructure costs scale with distance, the fact that Spain has one of the highest rural fiber deployment rates in the EU is simply remarkable. Is it the best in the EU? Without taking its size into account, maybe not, but it’s close. Omdia’s Fiber Development Index Analysis conducted in 2024 placed Spain among the top ten countries in the world with the best fiber infrastructure, in the same league as China and South Korea.¹⁸

Speaking of infrastructure, Spain has the second-longest high-speed rail network in the world behind China, but that’s a topic for another time.

Final point: infrastructure matters. Not in an abstract economic sense, but in tangible lived experience. Fast internet and a hot kebab that arrives in ten minutes shouldn’t be considered luxuries. This is the baseline of a flourishing society. If we learn nothing else from history, vigilant oversight supercharges infrastructure.

When fiber comes to your town, get your bolsas out. Or just bring your bolsas to Spain.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for more about Spain from the perspective of a disturbed American transplant.

1. The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal & Free the Net by Bruce Kushnick, CreateSpace (February 20, 2015)

2. As opposed to binary representation, where there are, for example, 1024 bits in a kilobyte.

3. Why Spain is a case study for super-fast broadband, Telefónica (November 20, 2017)

4. History of telecommunications in Spain, Telecom IP (May 13, 2024)

5. Sosthenes Behn, Encyclopaedia Britannica (accessed October 29, 2025)

6. The Sovereign State: The Secret History of International Telephone and Telegraph by Anthony Sampson, Hodder & Stoughton (July 1, 1973)

7. Stabilization and Growth under Dictatorship: The Experience of Franco’s Spain by Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Joan R. Rosés, and Isabel Sanz Villarroya, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (presented May 13-24, 2010)

8. Civilian Agency Records RG 84: Spain in State Department and Foreign Affairs Records, National Archives (accessed October 29, 2025)

9. 1959: The Stabilization Plan and the End of Autarky in Historical Turning Points in Spanish Economic Growth and Development, 1808–2008 (pages 123-158) by Elena Martínez Ruiz and Maria A. Pons, Palgrave Macmillan (2020)

10. The Golden Age of Spanish Capitalism: Economic Growth without Political Freedom in Spain Transformed: The Franco Dictatorship, 1959-1975 (pages 30–46) by Pablo Martín-Aceña and Elena Martínez-Ruiz, Palgrave Macmillan (2007)

11. Spain: a country study edited by Eric Solsten and Sandra Meditz, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress (1990)

12. Socialists in Power (1982-1996): Modernization, Europe and ‘Dirty War’ in The Nation in Its Labyrinth: An Introduction to Contemporary Spain since 1898 by Begoña Sangrador-Vegas, Pressbooks (accessed October 29, 2025)

13. Spain: From Protectionism to Advocacy of Liberalisation by Keith Salmon, Real Instituto Elcano (November 8, 2002)

14. Fiber deployment in Spain by Joan Calzada, Begoña García-Mariñoso, Jordi Ribé, Rafael Rubio, and David Suárez, Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer (May 19, 2018)

15. Assume long-haul backbone fiber infrastructure (intercity) is ~80,000km, metro distribution (intracity) is ~175,000km, street access (shared by buildings) is ~115,000km, and building drops (street to building entrance) are ~180,000km. Summing those results in ~550,000km for a complete, single-operator network. Then double that to account for overlapping networks since there are multiple operators, and we have ~1,100,000km. Dividing that by 384,400km (average Earth-Moon distance) equals ~2.86, meaning Spain’s installed fiber could stretch to the moon approximately 2.86 times. This is a very rough estimate that is probably wrong.

16. FTTH/B Market Panorama 2025: Key Trends and Insights for Fiber Optic Providers in the EU, Deepomatic (April 9, 2025)

17. Spain size comparison, MapFight.xyz (accessed October 29, 2025)

18. Omdia’s Fiber Development Index Analysis 2024 Report, Telecoms.com (November 14, 2024)