Using a Verizon iphone 4S in Costa Rica

[olmurabis]

My wife would like to use her Verizon iPhone 4S when she goes down to Costa Rica this summer. She doesn’t need it to call or receive calls from the US; just to call local numbers in Costa Rica, and use the internet.

How do we set this up, and will the usage be expensive?

[DavidCMurray]

Anyone can buy a prepaid ICE SIM in Costa Rica and fund it to the level they choose. The minimum, initially, is c2,500 — about $5.00US. The rate per minute for nationwide calling is about c34 — roughly $.07US per minute. You can recharge your SIM online or at any of about a zillion retail locations.

Not every vendor of SIMs may have the SIM trimmer that’s needed to make the typical SIM work in an iPhone. the ICE offices do have them, however.

You also have the option of buying a prepaid SIM from Movistar or Claro, two competitors for ICE. I’m not familiar with their terms.

The remaining question is whether your Verison-issued iPhone can be unlocked and is it compatible with the Costa Rican cellular systems. Anyone?

[Cancertomnpdx]

This is what I was able to do with my 2G T-Mobile phone in Orosi, Costa Rica last October.
(1.) The guest house where I was staying didn’t have WiFi, but their restaurant/school did. So I would download my emails from gmail to my phone and answer them offline when I went back to the guest house in the afternoons after my classes.
(2.) I also discovered that when I was in the school and connected to their WiFi, I could use both my Skype account and my T-Mobile contact list dialing via T-Mobile WiFi calling feature. I was carefully at first to make certain I wasn’t running up huge charges, but it went against my 300 daytime minutes and since I have an unlimited data plan it didn’t make much of a dent in it.
(3.) Everyone in Costa Rica I wanted to call, I called them on Skype either on their Skype account or at the 2.3 cents per minute from my cash reserve on Skype I have in order to call people’s cell phones.
(4.) Friends in the states, I called them on T-Mobile WiFi calling through my contract list on my gmail account since it is is synced to my iGoogle account.
(5.) I got myself a Portland Oregon phone number on my Skype account so you could call me and leave me voice mail. Skype sends you an email to your email account when someone leaves you voice mail. You can purchase the voice mail by the quarter or the year. I picked the year giving my whole contact list of friends and family the Skype number. Privately I asked several people to test it for me before I left on the trip and it worked perfectly. I had one or two voice mails from friends in Costa Rica when I was in Costa Rica so it can work both with people want to call you from either the states or trying to get in touch when you are in Costa Rica.
(6.) When I was staying in a small hotel in Alajeula, their WiFi was never above one bar, but it worked perfectly for both my email traffic and twice I had to call my credit union here in Portland via Skype to reset my password on my debit card. Both from Alajeula and Orosi, I was able to log on to my credit union account via my 2G phone, local WiFi and through my iGoogle feature of my T-Mobile phone.
(7.) I had a conversation with T-Mobile in person on Sunday and I am now thinking that I might renew my contract with them and upgrade to 4G in October. Then I could move to Costa Rica next year and finish out my contract using WiFi and Skype features I have described above. Since my property sits on an mountain high above and overlooking Orosi, I have a direct line and view of the upgrade WiFi tower in downtown Orosi.

If you have any questions, please ask me privately.

Thanks,
Tom
Portland, Oregon, closer to moving to Palomo more then ever!

PS: On my return from my last trip, I asked T-Mobile for the number to unlock my current phone on advice of a friend who has traveled world-wide using his T-Mobile account. T-Mobile was more then willing to give up the number. This means that you could if you wanted, buy yourself a monthly long ICE Sim card and swap out the Sim cards using it in Costa Rica. On the last trip I took along an international cell phone I bought off Amazon for $40. By the time I go around to getting the Sim card in Orosi, I was already using the features I mentioned above. If you have a WiFi calling feature on your current phone service provider and a free Skype account, you can get by for both phone service, email mail traffic and web searching like I did.

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