I came to Costa Rica with the impression that it was some kind of third world country. Downtown is kind of old and dirty, but the country is a lot more modern than I thought it would be. The Internet access here is very impressive. Almost everywhere I've been, for the past few days, has free WiFi, and at about half of those places, it's pretty fast.
The access here at my friend's house is pretty good. He has WiFi with a 10 Mbps Internet service connection, and an Ethernet (wired connection only, no WiFi, to keep it secure for his business) box with a 100 Mbps Internet service connection. The Ethernet box is just as fast as my FiOS connection back in the USA, although sometimes the throughput here in Costa Rica slows down due to a backbone router logjam in Central America. I've hit a couple of snags that didn't last more than 5 minutes or so.
I was in my bedroom trying to use the WiFi on my tablet, and I couldn't get a WiFi connection. I asked Jerry if the WiFi router was down. He said, "Oh... I left my phone in the car. Hang on a second." He came back and set the phone down (Samsung Galaxy S5) on my nightstand and said, "You should get a good connection now." I just said, "What's up with that?" He said, "The 4G cellular Internet service in Costa Rica is outstanding, as long as you're in one of the service areas. It's consistently 10 Mbps, and sometimes up to 15 Mbps, depending on how many of my neighbors are downloading porn videos at the same time." I said, "I've been using your 4G connection the whole time?" He said, "Yeah. The only thing that I use this phone for is as a hotspot for the 4G connection. That way we have mobile internet in the car and the helicopter, too, although the speed drops down to 1 or 2 Mbps in the mountains."
He uses an S4 Mini as his regular phone. The company that he uses gives him unlimited 4G access for $20 per month, as a perk for buying their 100 Mbps service. He said that another company, Cable Tica, I think, has pretty good high-speed Internet access, too, for about the same price as in the USA.
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