Expat Life: Can You Watch College Football in Ecuador (and other burning technology questions)?

Edd:  As a University of Georgia graduate, I am SO excited that college football season is about to start. Go Dawgs!

Cynthia:  (Sigh) No need to make plans for Saturday afternoons the next few months. It wasn’t always easy for you to watch live sporting events.

E:  Unless it was soccer. 🙄 When we first moved to Cuenca, we paid $30 a month for dial-up internet service that we shared with five other people. At night when everyone was online looking at Facebook or whatever you couldn’t even stay connected.

C:  Now we pay $25 for dedicated fiber optic service with 400 Mbps. What an improvement! And we could get 500 Mbps if we wanted to pay a little more, but what we have works fine. You mentioned soccer because when we had DirecTV that was the only sport we could watch.

E:  What a waste of money that was. A bunch of Spanish channels and 10-year-old U.S. reruns, but it was the only local source of live television. I started exploring other options online and we canceled it after a year.

C:  We actually don’t watch much TV, but you’ve found sites where we could tune in to almost any channel, right?

 E:  Yep, and I’m always looking for new ones. I don’t participate in chats on Reddit or Quora, but I somehow stumbled upon a Reddit site that has multiple feeds for pretty much any sporting event happening anywhere on the planet. So if, say, a football game is being aired on the SEC network instead of the major ones, no problem.

 C:  Is that how we watched the Olympics?

 E:  No, like you said, I've got several sources for live TV. Since we were watching the NBC recap of the Olympics at night, we streamed it through a website I found that has a zillion channels plus separate categories for MLB, NFL, and WNBA games. No need for a VPN either. It’s fabulous.

 C:  You do a great job of finding TV series, movies, and documentaries for us to watch too. Emily in Paris is such a cute show and a current favorite. It’s crazy that we can stream or download basically anything for free from this country. No Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV. Nada.

 E:  Technology in Ecuador has really come a long way since those early days. Our first cell phone here was one of those cheap “candy bar” models. We used it for years until we noticed the indigenous ladies selling produce from wheelbarrows whipping out iPhones and decided maybe it was time for an upgrade.

C:  Ha. Now we each have a smartphone. Mine has a U.S. number that we use when we’re there, and yours has a local number and an eSIM card that we activate when we are in other countries. Our carrier here offers a senior discount, so the monthly bill is around $8.

E:  I just read that the average American household pays almost $300 a month for internet, phone, streaming and cable TV plans. We pay a total of $33: $25 for internet, $8 for cell phone service, and $0 for TV and streaming.

C:  Wow, what an incredible difference that we should mention more often, along with the $0 we pay for heating and air conditioning. Yet another example of the low cost of living in Ecuador!