www.CostaRicaTicas.com

Just for the record the sims the street vendors sell are new and come in a packet with instructions etc.. they are not stolen. They are certified vendors. There is no setup required as others have stated. Turn off your phone and change sim chips and restart the phone. Make sure it acquires a network signal and has a data connection. 2 mil. Comes with 1mil credit. Few things are simpler than that. To each his own.
When i go to nica i buy a chip while waiting at the border. They ask for 14$ i offer 5$ they always accept.

Go to any Kolbi store and get a Sim for 1k, comes with 1k in airtime. There is no lengthy set up, they do it in about 5 minutes.

$14? $5?

I am confused with your two posts. In your first post, you stated "Of course its in someone elses name.". If it's new, how could it be in someone else's name?

The street vendors are an added convenience if indeed the sim cards are new, but your first post led me to believe they are used. That is the reason I posted about the consequences of buying a stolen sim.

Ok now i understand why you thought that. For me it is the most convenient way to get a new sim. No paperwork or having to carry around your passport. The sim are in the sellers name. The seller makes a phone call to activate the sim chip. I install it and check to see if it works , pay the 2 mil and off i go.
Some people think it needs to be setup or something. Just swap sim. I dont like a K*D messing with my phone anyway.

By the way i bought a phone for a friend, blu for 12 mil including chip. Store asked for my passport, said it was for a friend and the store put it in the owners name. Only in CR.

Just curious. What's the concern about having the number under your name?

I care about privacy and all that, but figure I'm not breaking any laws so no biggie.

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Any worries about breaking laws wouldn't concern the consumer in this instance, anyway. That would all fall upon the vendor or carrier. These kinds of laws and rules are always vague here in Costa Rica. Ask 3 different people and get 3 different answers.

My experience with cellular service in Costa Rica is that Prepaid SIMs are available to anyone, and are not associated with any particular name. A Prepaid SIM is probably the best solution for almost anyone from the USA with a GSM quad-band, unlocked phone.

If you want data service, in my opinion, the best solution is to just forget about data service from the cellular service providers in Costa Rica. The 4G data service in Costa Rica is excellent, in those areas where it is available, but it operates on LTE bands that are not supported by the phones that are sold in the USA. It's actually also kind of hit-or-miss on the 3G+ and 3G service here, as well. Some U.S. phones support the proper UTMS frequencies, and others do not. If your phone doesn't support the proper UTMS frequencies, then you'll be stuck with agonizingly slow GSM data service.

For data, just forget about the cellular carriers. Turn off your Data Roaming, and just use the free WiFi that is available throughout Costa Rica. Almost every decent hotel, restaurant, and bar in Costa Rica offers decent free WiFi Internet access. Kolbi/ICE just rolled out their new Fiber access within the past few weeks, and it is Stellar! I'm getting 100 mbps-Plus at my home in San José.

Back on the cellular service topic, my understanding is that Postpaid accounts -- contracts where you pay at the end of the month -- are only legally available to Citizens or Residents of Costa Rica. However, just as with the bank account issue, I discovered, before I was a resident, that getting a postpaid cellular account is just a matter of asking different people until you get a different answer. In an effort to open a bank account, before I was a Resident, I visited three BCR branches. The first two branches said, "No Way." The third said, "Can I see your Passport, please?"

One completely Bonehead move that I pulled here in Costa Rica is going to a retail store to purchase a smartphone. Any of you guys who are considering purchasing a smartphone in Costa Rica can learn from my mistake.

This store had exactly the phone that I wanted, at a cheaper price than Kolbi was selling it for. I happily bought the phone, took it home, and plugged my Kolbi SIM into it. Almost all phones in Costa Rica are sold "Unlocked." I typed in the PIN for the SIM, and the phone started right up. Voice and text all worked perfectly. All of my stuff transferred over from my Google account.

But wait! What's this? Where's my 4G? The phone just kept telling me "3G+", with about a 1 mbps bandwidth. I finally called up Kolbi and asked them if I was doing something wrong. The guy on the phone asked me where I got the phone. I told him the name of the store. The guy said, "Oh. That phone has an LTE radio on band 3. Our LTE works on band 7." I took the phone back to the store. Guess what? No refunds, since there was nothing wrong with the phone.

Lesson learned.

I dont like to carry my passport around, wait in line and fill out paper work to get a sim. I am a privacy advocate although thats a losing battle these days. When i was in colombia buying a sim chip from the supermarket exito it was a nightmare. They called a number for me and handed me the phone. I have a hard time understanding the paisa accent. She asked me all these questions could not understand then she hung up. After about a half hour of this i finally got the chip. So the easiest quickest way is for me.

Interesting info about LTE. I will take that in mind when i get my next phone. My present phone is 4g hspa. 3g+. Thought that was as fast as LTE. Getting a little complicated with this LTE stuff.

I tnought it was against the law in CR to sell a locked phone. Contract or no contract.

In colombia i only bought data, 1gb or 30 days, 6$. They gave you a few minutes of call time. Great deal.

In CR i buy call time and have data anytime i want. I put in around 6$ per month. Dont use much data. 450mb last month.

i have a BLU studioX plus 5.5 140$ in colombia. Android version 5.01. Good phone for the money. Noticed on amazon that it comes in two different versions. One for north america and one version for the rest of the world.

I've never had to show ID to buy a Prepaid SIM in Costa Rica. Maybe some places require it, but downtown, on the street... No.



I'm not a tech dude, so I'm just quoting what my tech dude tells me. There are a couple of technologies that are considered to be "4G". The only one that is used in Costa Rica is LTE.

As a side-note on the 4G, I was one of Kolbi's first 4G customers. When I bought the phone, they asked me to test the bandwidth for a couple of weeks. We were up to 120 mbps at one point. Sadly, those days are over.




I did not know that, but it would not surprise me. As I said earlier, almost every phone sold in Costa Rica is unlocked.




In spite of my eternal quest for 4G service, it's really becoming kind of a non-issue in Costa Rica. WiFi is so widely available that it's almost a waste of money to have any kind of cellular data service in Costa Rica.

Just for reference, I am running a Samsung Galaxy S4 on Kolbi for 10K Colones per month. That includes 100 minutes of voice and 300 text messages. I never even get close to those limits. It also includes some kind of 3G access, but I forget what that is. The reason I forget that is because I bought a 6-month "package" from Kolbi for 4G access for 19K Colones. That was almost 2 years ago. Kolbi never turned off my 4G access. So, basically, for 10K Colones per month, I'm getting phone, text, and unlimited 10 mbps 4G Internet access. Not a bad deal, in my opinion.

For information purposes, in Costa Rica, Kolbi operates on band 7, 2600 Mhz. Claro and Movistar operate on band 3, 1800 Mhz. So, if you are planning to buy a smart phone, look at the operational frequencies (Mhz).

Yep, GoodDayJohn!

That's EXACTLY what happened to me!

My dumb ass just moved to Costa Rica a few months ago, and although I've been visiting for awhile, I never had a phone in Costa Rica. I bought a phone that was on "Band 3", when I should have bought one that was on "Band 7". My previous phone was one that my girlfriend bought me, when I got my service with Kolbi, initially.