Working remotely from an island built on its side

What ANACOM's figures actually say

At the end of the fourth quarter of 2025 the regulator put FTTH coverage in the Autonomous Region of Madeira at 99.8%*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026 of dwellings and business premises. That is the highest of the nine NUTS II regions, against a national figure of 95.2%*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026.

The same report then counts how many of those passed dwellings actually buy the service. Nationally that is 58.4%*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026. In Madeira it is 41.7%*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026, and ANACOM states in its own text that Madeira is the only region in the country below half.

The reason is cable, not apathy

Madeira has the highest cable take-up in Portugal at 52.3%*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026, against a national 27.7%*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026, on a coaxial network passing 75.7%*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026 of dwellings. Madeira is a cable island that also happens to be wired for fibre. A household here is likelier than a household anywhere else in the country to be on coax, and a great deal of the fibre going past the door has never been sold to anyone.

The Region counted 96,000*, source: ANACOM, Q4 2025, read August 26, 2026 residential high-speed fixed clients in the same quarter.

Coverage is counted at the dwelling, not at the desk

ANACOM's coverage estimates are built from data the operators report quarterly under Decreto-Lei n.º 40/2022 and Portaria n.º 77/2023. The unit of account is the dwelling or the business premises, and the question asked about it is whether a network passes it.

ANACOM also publishes the granular version. GEO.ANACOM maps the networks present at a point rather than in a municipality — the regulator's own description is that any user can look up as redes disponíveis num determinado local. On flat ground the town-level number and the address-level number converge. On Madeira they do not have to. A house with an unobstructed view of the Atlantic can still sit behind a ridge as far as a radio path is concerned, and the fibre that reaches a village centre does not automatically turn up an access track above it.

The regional government says this out loud

Its tourism service is blunter about the mobile side than any operator is. The official guidance on booking a walking trail tells visitors to pay before setting off, because internet coverage in mountainous areas may be limited. That sentence is written for hikers. It describes a house at the top of a valley road just as accurately.

So the test that settles the question is the one run at the address, not the one run on a coverage map of the town. Two houses ten minutes apart in the same place on any shortlist of where to live can return different answers, and the drive between them is covered in how movement around the island actually works.

Mobile, and the parishes with no 5G at all

ANACOM's parish-level count is the clearest published picture of mobile reach, and it is coarser than it first looks. Reporting on the first quarter of 2024, the regulator recorded 5G base stations in every one of the country's municipalities. Across the two autonomous regions taken together, 5G had reached 77% of parishes (161)*, source: ANACOM, Q1 2024, read September 8, 2026, leaving 49 parishes*, source: ANACOM, Q1 2024, read September 8, 2026 with no 5G station installed at all.

That figure combines Madeira with the Azores. ANACOM does not split it. The Madeira-only number is therefore not published, and any page that quotes one has invented it. What the combined figure does establish is that parish-level 5G gaps in the autonomous regions were still counted in dozens rather than in ones.

The regulator's quarterly mobile services report carries no regional breakdown whatsoever. It reports 5G nationally and stops there.

One national price list, and it is not the Madeira price

MEO, NOS, Vodafone and DIGI all operate in the Region, and ANACOM's coverage data covers all four. Their published tariffs are national documents: the fibre price list a household in Funchal reads is the same one a household in Braga reads.

One line at the bottom of it is not the same. MEO's published fibre tariff closes by stating that the prices shown include IVA at the legal rate of 23%*, source: Portal das Finanças, read August 26, 2026. That is the mainland standard rate. Under article 18.º of the Código do IVA, the standard rate for operations treated as taking place in the Autonomous Region of Madeira is 22%*, source: Portal das Finanças, read August 26, 2026, set by Lei n.º 14-A/2012.

The headline monthly figure on a national price list is therefore computed on a tax rate that does not apply on this island. The gap is small and it runs in the subscriber's favour. It is also a clean worked example of the thing that goes wrong across this entire subject: national documents are written for the mainland, and Madeira is quietly a separate tax jurisdiction inside them. The same pattern runs through what the published rates say living here costs.

Promotional monthly prices are not recorded on this page. They move between quarters, they depend on the loyalty period, and not one of them is Madeira-specific.

The clock

Madeira keeps the same legal time as mainland Portugal. Lisbon and Funchal are never an hour apart. The island therefore runs on the same clock as the United Kingdom and Ireland, and an hour behind Madrid, Paris and Berlin, throughout the year.

The changeover is EU law rather than national law, and it can be cited exactly. Directive 2000/84/EC puts clocks forward by sixty minutes at 01.00 Greenwich Mean Time on the last Sunday in March in every member state, and back at 01.00 GMT on the last Sunday in October.

Madeira’s base offset is set by regional law, not national: Decreto Legislativo Regional n.º 6/96/M, de 25 de Junho, in terms identical to Decreto-Lei n.º 17/96 for the mainland, with the Azores an hour behind under Decreto Legislativo Regional n.º 16/96/A. Read as published by the Observatório Astronómico de Lisboa, which maintains Portugal’s legal time; its certificate is expired, so retrieval requires bypassing verification, and the text is served in full. The relationship above is not in dispute anywhere;

What the alignment is worth in practice is that a working day on Madeira overlaps a London day and a Lisbon day completely, with no adjustment at either end. Madeira is not a time zone of its own, and it is not on Azores time.