In the News be available in 50% of municipalities with 20,000 inhabitants and a few places with 10,000. This is equivalent to 75% of the 47 million population of Spain. Vodafone pioneered the 5G service in Spain in June 2019 and it is operational in 21 cities, and Orange will launch their network in five large Spanish cities in October. A snag at present is that 5G will be available only on the 3.7GHz band which has a low penetration in buildings, and is not a “stand alone” 5G system. This will not be improved until the government has an auction for the 700MHz band that is expected in early 2021. All 5G compatible mobiles at present cost about 1,000 euros but the network offers greater bandwidth and much faster speeds. Apple has yet to introduce their 5G model.
IP address on November 10th after the Spanish court investigators had given them this date, but no-one had realised that the date in the information from the US was 10 / 11 so October 11th. IP addresses are dynamic so they can change each time a computer is used and the relevant IP address had been used by the family on November 10th but not on October 11th. Luckily, a lawyer acting for the family eventually obtained the original information sent from the US and spotted the date error. It had taken a month to get the son’s computer released which had affected the making of the film.
US Date Confusion The US has a unique system of writing down the date / month / year that can be very confusing. They put a date in the order of month / day / year so when the attacks on the World Trade Centre took place on September 11th they refer to this date as being 9/11. In other countries it would be 11/9. Spain refers to important dates using the day and the initial letter of the month, so September 11th is referred to as 11 S and Christmas day is 25 D. Recently, it was revealed that a family of four in Madrid are suing the Department of Justice for 27,000 euros after a terrible period of seven months. It all started when police and a court official turned up with a search warrant, took away computers, USB sticks and mobile phones and conducted an exhaustive search. This extended to their oldest son who lived elsewhere and was involved in the production of a film. They took away his computer (that was the only one with some of the completed filming) and his phone and searched his car. It emerged that the search was related to child pornography but the investigation was “under seal” by the court so no exact details were revealed. It turned out eventually that the US body the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, via the US embassy in Madrid, had alerted the Spanish Cybercrime police that when a particular IP address was being used in Spain three videos of child porn had been uploaded to Facebook. Telefónica and Microsoft pinpointed this family as having used this
Flu Jabs in October The Spanish Ministry of Health have announced that throughout Spain vaccinations against the flu will be available in the first fortnight of October, but at the time of going to press there was no more information. Usually there are about 90,000 doses available in the province but in other years the vaccination program has not started until midNovember. Bringing forward the date whilst the pandemic is still in force is seen as a good way of combating the flu earlier than normal and it is considered that health centres will have the capacity in October to carry out the vaccinations. There are common symptoms between having the flu and the COVID-19 virus, but having a severe cold and a throat inflammation are not regularly symptoms of the pandemic. In normal years, where the aim in particular is to stop elderly people getting the flu, only about 60% of pensioners have the vaccination. The Health Department state that they want a much larger number to have the flu vaccine this year as the danger is that hospital beds may be in short supply, depending on the evolution of the pandemic. The
20
Continued ....