Cell phone service

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  • #160141
    ddspell12
    Member

    Moving to Costa Rica. Currening have att&t. How does it work in Costa Rica?

    #160142
    camby
    Member

    [quote=”ddspell12″]Moving to Costa Rica. Currening have att&t. How does it work in Costa Rica?

    [/quote]

    We have Verizon, no “G’s”, just regular service and slid sheaper phones.was told it would not work tehre.Might take our Ipad and just pay for service and/or WiFi..

    #160143
    DavidCMurray
    Participant

    [quote=”ddspell12″]Moving to Costa Rica. Currening have att&t. How does it work in Costa Rica?

    [/quote]

    In the U.S., AT&T operates on the GSM technology that is also used in Costa Rica. So far, so good.

    If you got your phone from AT&T, it is “locked” onto their system and must be “unlocked” so that it can work using another carrier’s SIM chip. Some have reported that AT&T Store employees can and will do this for you. It’s a matter of knowing the right buttons to push and in which order.

    The other matter is that of the frequency on which AT&T operates and the frequency that the Costa Rican companies operate on. There are four GSM frequencies one or another of which is used all over the world — on GSM networks. Verizon, by contrast, operates on a CDMA network that is incompatible with any other. If you had a Verizon phone, you’d be totally out of luck.

    Many modern GSM (3G) phones are “quad-band”. That is, they’ll detect any of the four GSM bands and use the one they find. If yours is quad-band, and if it’s unlocked, then you can buy a SIM card from the ICE kiosk in the airport, insert it in place of the AT&T SIM and chat away.

    You can do a Google search on your phone’s make and model and check the technical specifications for which bands it operates on.

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