I saw the tag line, liked what I saw until "powered by Telefonica".
Seriously, I've lived in more than half of the European countries for a while, and never ever EVER saw such a shitty internet service as in Spain over their network. Lack of service for hours every day, substandard speeds... It made me anticipate a move to Portugal by one year because of their shitty service.
Same here, if you ask anybody in South America if there is a something like Comcast in their country they will all answer Telefónica without thinking.
Telefónica bought pretty much every South American national phone monopoly when the country privatized it. I dealt with them while living in Chile and let me tell you: Comcast's customer service is top notch compared to them.
By putting that logo in there, Mozilla is pretty much shutting down any chance of adoption in South America. In my case, even Microsoft's logo would be easier to swallow.
I don't view Telefonica being good/bad at running a mobile network as too relevant to this offering. It's a different product running on very different infrastructure. I do think their involvement is a good reason to be cautious, though. Why are Mozilla not running it themselves, and what does Telefonica intend to get out of the service? (large telcos generally don't run free services out of the goodness of their heart)
O2 in Germany sucks, though. You actually have to snail-mail them your resignation letter, there are frequent brief outages in the night and they are often slow at setting up your service.
I mean, they do deliver decent internet, but their customer service is awful.
I would prefer to send them written notice about resignation rather than a call where they try and talk you out of it. I do the same with credit cards because you always get put through to the "please stay with us, keep your card, just don't use it" people who I don't wish to argue with.
Just because it's common doesn't mean it's acceptable. There's no reason why signing up should be easier than canceling. It's just a trick to be able to charge the customer one last time.
Pretty standard. Try to find a "cancel my service" link anywhere on the Verizon or Comcast website. You have to call them, at minimum, and then as soon as your intentions are clear you will be transitioned to a "retention specialist" who will waste your time trying to talk you into keeping the service.
I've had Movistar (TF are using Movistar branding for home services as well as mobile now) fibre in Barcelona for over a year now and I can't remember a single outage. Don't get me wrong as with any large incumbent they suck in many ways but I've personally had no problems with them as an internet provider. Dealing with the for fixed lines for ADSL provided by other companies was more of a pain though.
Actually my experience is entirely different. Extremely good service, even in remote locations. Whereas in the UK, most providers except very expensive ones are a nightmare.
True, they're technically ahead with the FTTH. But if you have their DSL and don't want them to do works in your house to install their FTTH cables and devices which aren't compatible with any other provider, so that if you are unhappy you have to do works again to change ISP, then you're stuck with at most 1 GB of data per month on mobile. FTTH customers have 2 GB but they won't give DSL customers the 2 GB, not even the option to pay for it, because you know, it's obvious that I need to install FTTH in my home if I want my mobile phone to be able to handle such a bandwidth! This tends to be their policy most of the time: if you don't buy their latest and greatest they screw you by not giving you any updates until they convince you to do so (with a long-term contract of course). Oh, and unacknowledge but obvious caps on various direct download websites, P2P, etc. which I guess would go away if I bought their latest and greatest too.
I'm currently with them because my preferred cable provider (R) didn't have coverage in my building a year ago, but now they do have coverage, so I'm probably saying bye-bye to Telefonica soon. Yes, the service is now technically good, even probably the best (FTTH), but who cares if all their policies (the above is just an example but there are lots more) are set to nickel-and-dime the customers, and to sell more and more and more. You can't even do a technical service call without them spamming you and trying to sell you stuff. R doesn't have FTTH but has a much, much better customer service (including automatic improvements in the bandwidth for time to time, without even asking).
Nope. Last year. Started their service Oct 2013 and left Oct 2014. It maybe area dependent (was in Andalucia) but I heard nothing but bad things about their service from the locals. Manilva (small town) was without internet for 2-3 days during the summer last year and no one in their customer service would even acknowledge it!
The Mayor of Manilva, Urieta Diego and director of the South Territory of Telefónica Spain, María Jesús Almazor, held a meeting to present the expansion plans the company has planned for the town. Thus, they have confirmed that it has begun the deployment of Fiber to the Home (FTTH) and that citizens already have 4G technology.
According highlighted the mayor, Manilva, later this year will be the first municipality in Andalusia to have installed fiber optic network in the hundred percent of the town.
I'm actually shocked by seeing Telefonica being able to so obviously placing their brand inside Firefox. I think it will seriously undermine peoples' trust into what is supposed to be an "independent" browser. Yes, people on HN know that Mozilla is since many years dependent on the sponsorship of Google et al. but having such obvious advertising?? Come on, Mozilla!
I think you misunderstand the point of FOSS. It doesn't matter if government funds it (Tor) or if private interests fund it (entire GNU ecosystem). It's about freedom to distribute and modify the source as one sees fit.
Also, advertising and sponsorship don't have to be one-way streets.
For example, by funding Mozilla, Google helped to remove Microsoft's browser monopoly. Since Google's business relies on the Web, that made perfect sense. Now they have their own browser too, which makes things complicated :)
Likewise, Microsoft currently has a dominant influence in video chat, thanks to Skype. It makes sense for Telefonica to erode that dominance, since they have more business opportunities in an open, many <-> many ecosystem compared to a Skype-only one.
Too many companies base their business model on becoming a monopoly in their field ("the next Microsoft", "the next Google", "the next Facebook", "the next Twitter", etc.), rather than allowing interoperability and having to succeed on merit. When this inevitably fails, they leave behind nothing except useless, incompatible APIs. Hopefully this is different :)
My point is not that I see FOSS at risk but that they undermine the (important) idea behind Firefox: Providing a way for people to participate at the internet in an open fashion while protecting people's privacy.
In the past we could hope that Mozilla and Google had the best interest of their users in mind but now having such super-obvious product placement? This raises a lot of questions for me and will do even more so for the average user.
Take it easy. Remember Mozilla used to be sponsored by google for letting them be the default search engine? That is product placement if anything is. And you can argue it's sneaky: I didn't realize it until I'd used Firefox for a couple of years.
Actually, quite a few non-profits are sponsored by commercial interests and while sometimes this is a problem, often it is not.
Also: How would you like to fund development of Firefox?
I believe that the folks at Mozilla are capable and willing enough to not let an external company interfere with their product in any way that would harm their users. However, it is also a question of being able to communicate this to their users. Putting the logo of a company which is at least not famous for protecting its users right in front of everyone does not help getting this message across. Furthermore, I assume that Mozilla has likely not even received money but just services in-kind. Damaging the reputation of a product that is critical to the open web for a couple of servers?
It's using WebRTC which is peer-to-peer for the actual audio/video streams, you just need some kind of intermediary to exchange SDPs to connect in the first place. (There are some examples of clever workarounds for this, like copying and pasting SDP strings over IM, but they're not a good user experience.)
It appears that my karma level don't allow me to downvote you (at 240 I only see the uparrow). I live in Spain and Telefonica is a very good company with an excellent service but a little expensive (you have to pay to have good quality). The appropriate word your post is FUD. I hope and wish that such a great company continues its expansion and growth. By the way, I am not affiliated with this company in any way but I recognize the value of great companies like telefonica.
Personal experience is not FUD. I'm not a user, but all I've heard about Telefonica is complaints and grievances. They were also the ISP which forced a caching proxy on its ADSL users, breaking a lot of sites. Granted that was a few years ago.
I and most of my friends and family in Spain have at some point spent hours trying to solve problems with our Telefónica phone and internet connections. Popularly it's known as Timofónica (Scam-ofonica).
When I hear the company's president mumbling [1] about how Google owes them money because Telefónica provides the networks, but Google makes the money thanks to their networks, I wonder how has the company grown so large, and how can a director be so incapable of coherent expression.
Edit: I leave this comment because I like Mozilla and enjoy Firefox, but I was dismayed to discover a few weeks ago that Telefónica was involved with Hello.
"Lack of service for hours every day", is that a personal experience?
Telefonica was providing services in villages and small towns with very difficult geography (mountains, roads, ...). Now there is a big competition in Spain, for example Jazztel is offering 200Gigabit/s up-down for 36 euros/moth and phone tax included. Our country is getting better in the IT sector and telefonica was the pioneer. It is easy to critique but in the old times there was no other option, and for many to have the opportunity to be connected is much better than to be out of the web.
"Lack of service for hours every day", is that a personal experience?
Yes, it's clear from the post that it is from personal experience. Why would you think otherwise?
Telefonica was providing services in villages and small towns with very difficult geography
Yes, back when it was a public company; that was just their responsibility.
It is easy to critique but in the old times there was no other option
Yes, but neither BSousa nor I were talking about dial-up times. Nor was the EU when they fined Telefonica for anti-trust violations, multiple times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telefónica#Monopoly
BSousa is commenting in another post down that in Manilva (a town in Spain) the service went down for two days ? (that's all). I posted a link in which Manilva is going to be the first town in Andalusia with 100% optic fiber (only telefonica) and now has 4G. There is one comment in that page from one people living there, and he says: At last we are going out of the prehistoric time.
There is a headline: Peter Thiel: Google Is A Monopoly - Business Insider
Living in Spain, I haven't noticed much to differentiate ISP's on compared to the UK. Telefonica seem very average to me, and their service was pretty reliable when we had it.
I live in Barcelona, is it likely that bigger cities get better service than other places?
Seriously, I've lived in more than half of the European countries for a while, and never ever EVER saw such a shitty internet service as in Spain over their network. Lack of service for hours every day, substandard speeds... It made me anticipate a move to Portugal by one year because of their shitty service.