Costa Rica Internet is currently socialized under government control.  Normally, you would take that as a red flag.  However, I haven’t had any real problems in Costa Rica with Internet service.  I am quite sure that if I ever have an outage, that I will have to deal with the normal problems of dealing with any government who doesn’t really care about their customers.

In addition, CAFTA (TLC) passed here and one of the criteria was opening up telecommunications to international competition.  Several companies have already started to implement alternatives to the government service (called ICE) here.

How about costs?  I pay $60/month for 500K upload and 2mb download speed.  I actually get that or at least 75% of that almost all of the time.  I have had no outages that lasted longer than 5 minutes.  I use ICE’s DSL service.  Lower cost services with lower bandwidth are available and much more common here.

Getting Internet set up in your home takes quite awhile if you just go through standard channels.  I have a neighbor who has been waiting for several months.

This is something you should learn very early on in your dealings in Costa Rica.  Tips or service fees are very important.  If you receive very good service from anyone, you should give a tip or pay a service fee.  If you want very good service for a future event, you should pay a tip in advance.

Maybe that’s about as far as I can go to explain that concept.  The equivalent of $10 or $20 goes a very long way to ensuring that you will receive excellent and prompt service here.

Of course, you don’t need Internet access in your home here.  Internet cafes are as common as small restaurants (called sodas), tiny grocery stores (called minisupers) and abogados (attorneys).  You literally can’t walk 2 kilometers in any town in any direction without finding all of the above.

The Internet cafes open early and close late.  Some are 24 hour.  The cost is about $1/hour (500 colognes/hour) and the speed and conditions of the computers is excellent.  Many Internet cafes are operated by English speakers.  Many have Skype installed on one or more computers and have headsets (although for sanitary reasons, you may want to bring your own headset).  You can make telephone calls for about 2 cents per minute just about anywhere in the world with Skype.

In fact, many Costa Ricans have a Skype phone at home for making international calls.  Skype isn’t just for geeks here.  Just about everyone knows what it is and if they have any international friends or relatives, have a Skype number and a Skype phone at home.

Internet access is excellent in Costa Rica.  A lack of reliable Internet access is definitely NOT one of the reasons that would rule out Costa Rica for a visit or residence for anyone.

-James D. Brausch