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Anybody have recent experience setting up internet? It seems I may need to prove residency to get ADSL or the Kolbi 3G USB stick, and my residency is about 9 months away if I am lucky. Any info would be great. Thank you in advance…
Damon
This is the first time I have heard of this requirement… but I don’t think it is correct.
Check at your local ICE office.The first critical question you must always answer is, “Where are you located?” No one company covers the entire country.
If you’re in an area that’s served only by ICE and their Internet service, that’s one set of issues. If you’re where you can be served by one of the private companies, that’s another.
So, where are you located?
Thanks David I totally forgot to mention that. We will be in Tarcoles, near Playa Azul. For those who are not familiar this is about 8 miles north of Jaco.
Before I got my temporary residency and thus my cedula, I owned a corporation. With the corporation, I was able to get in the name of the corporation: electricity, 3g telephone service, a 3g data stick and internet service, and a prepaid phone Simm card for an unlocked 3g phone that I brought to Costa Rica. When I got my cedula, I dissolved the corporation and got all of the above in my own name. You could also get someone with residency or a Costa Rican citizen to get any of these things in their name and you could pay the bill for them.
You can buy a Data-Card (Stick) and get a prepaid simcard at ICE. You pay 9000 Colones for 30 days with 1 MB speed.
You can also recharge at the local stores but this gives you only a 512 KB.BEWARE of ICE.
I suggest if ICE is jerking you around, look to Claro, TIGO, etc. who may be happy for your business without the headaches and may offer alternatives.
My recent experience with ICE is as follows:
Went to local ICE office in Huacas to set up a new phone line / DSL for my newly built home near Playa Conchal. ICE happily collected my installation fees on November 1, and I signed an installation contract. They said they’d have me up an running the following week. I ordered this under my Corporation and had no ‘residency’ issue.
It is now February 13, and I have ONLY a telephone line installed, and that finally was done last week. This is after about 7 ‘no show’ appointments by the installers, numerous strange excuses by ICE of why they couldn’t complete my installation of the new phone line / DSL…INCLUDING a demand that I pay them $1,000 for new wire. My hookup is about 40 feet from an existing phone pole with cable running to it. (This strange demand turned out to be a result of ICE accidentally assuming I lived in a different neighborhood almost 2 miles away from where I actually live, which it took them 6 weeks to figure out. DOH.)
Nearly all of the homes in my neighborhood are already hooked up and running with ICE phone and DSL, although the DSL speed is horrendously slow due to our distance from the nearest ‘repeater’ station (4.5KM). We currently have no alternate service providers serving our neighborhood so we’re stuck with the shreds of crappy Internet service ICE provides.
After 3 months of jerking me around, finally ICE stated that they refuse to activate my DSL signal because my neighborhood is too far away from the repeater, and the resulting service problems in my neighborhood are simply TOO annoying for them to deal with. Therefore, they refuse to sign up any more customers in my area.
Nice.
So now, I’m stuck getting internet using my I-Phone with 3G using my ICE Card and my signal is spotty at best b/c there isn’t a tower nearby. Thankfully I’m on a hill and have a terrace – but if I go in the house I’m completely incommunicado.
Now looking at NON-ICE options to get service to my area since we DO, finally, have new competitors in the country. With luck, I will convince a competitor to bring service to our area, and then I can convince my neighbors to pull the plug on ICE, thus depriving them of the fairly substantial revenue they’ve been collecting in exchange for terrible service they’ve provided thus far as the monopoly provider.
I have a friend who has a house by Samara, she has the same experience. In case of emergency it takes weeks for ICE to show up and do repairs.
I have no idea why their service sucks at the beach.
In Tilaran and the Lake Area I have only good experiences with ICE, normally they show up the very same day or the next day. New instalation of phone or electric takes a week or so.Out here in the mountains outside of San Isdro, 3g is our only option. We have no wired phone lines but we are in line site of a cell tower. We never get even the basic speed that we pay for and sometimes we get no internet at all. Once we trien upgrading to a higher speed service and it made no difference. We tried a friend’s Claro data stick and got no signal at all. I don’t know about TIGO. I will have to check in to that company. I have been told that ICE is renting the local towers to these competitor companies and that may be why our signal strength is so much worse this year than it was last year. Phone service is very bad also. Many times we can not even call out. We went into the ICE office and the service agent made a failure of service report on both the phone and the internet. Internet got a little better but not the phone.
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