A company called “Velox” offers something called “banda larga” here. One could call it “broad band”, if only it wasn’t slower than a modem connection half the time. If this wasn’t enough, broadband access is “demonopolized” in Brazil in the strangest of ways. You have a single DSL provider in Rio (Velox). But you can’t get “access” through them. You have to also pick another company to be your “service provider.” As far as I can tell, the latter company doesn’t provide any service that is of use to me, just a web portal, web mail, etc. I think they are also the ones providing DNS and that sort of stuff, but this really shouldn’t cost any real money. You would think that someone would jump in and provide minimal service (basically just DNS) for close to nothing – but apparently someone tried and they cracked down on them.

So, as a result, instead of paying one monopolistic price, you first pay the monopolist whatever they charge and then pay again.