Meanwhile a local company, Conecta3, had been cabling up Pinoso. After a while, they offered a service to the outlying villages too. The speed was better, 8mb, and their all in package for land line, Internet and mobile, was less than I was paying Movistar. I hesitated for a while because of the potential problems of switching but, in the end, it all went smoothly.
The firm has been good. They increased the speed out here in the sticks to 12mb without increasing the price (I just checked a moment ago, it's running at 11.52 for download and 1.19mb for upload) and in town they are running at a very creditable 300mb. They also set up hotspots all over Pinoso so I can connect my mobile to Wi-Fi for free. The only time that we have had a real problem they had an engineer here within ten minutes. It turned out that the cat had pulled out some plug in the skein of cables where phones, Hi-Fi and lamps cohabit.
There's a Facebook page called something like Pinoso buying, selling and helping. Somebody asked, on that page, if anyone was having trouble with Conecta3 and I mentioned that the Internet service dropped out every now and then and that I needed to reconnect - a bit of a nuisance but not really a problem - I said.
A couple of hours later I got a private Facebook message from the boss at Conecta3, a chap that we know. He mildly chided me for not having reported the problem. He said that we'd missed out on an update to our antenna for some reason and that he hoped the oversight had now been remedied.
Living in a small place certainly has its advantages at times.