Wow, it was an odyssey but I made it! I have been working on an album here in Costa Rica which I finished a few months ago, it was a lot of work, but I did it. Now I wanted to try and promote it on the web. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I live at the end of a dirt road up in the foothills of an active volcano in Turrialba. We are renting, and the owner had told us that they had ordered phones so we could get internet. What they had not told us is that they hadn’t paid their bill to ICE the phone company/electric company state monopoly or that we were going to have to install a few telephone poles. Things move slowly here in Costa Rica so weeks turned into months. I didn’t mind not having the internet because it can be so distracting, I was working on music etc. I heard for ages about this datacard thing to get 3g and internet through the air.
I realized that I could probably get it through the net and since I have switched to Mac for everything pretty much, I though, ok, I will get a 3g iPhone in order to get online, jailbreak, unlock it and then get 3g card and then figure out how to tether it as a modem in order to get online.
Wow, easy enough right? WRONG.
Oh my God, I had no idea how hard it would be and what I would learn along the way. First of all, I can be pretty technical if I have to be. In fact, I like challenges. But I also like simplicity as well. That’s why I switched to Mac. Trying to set up a side-chain on your bass in Logic with the correct routing and threshold, etc, etc. is already hard enough, so I don’t/didn’t want to worry about the OS in music and on my Macintorsh. But then I found out, wow, Mac’s are simple until you are trying to crack an iPhone or get into the guts of the system. What a pain and not recommended for the light of heart. I had no choice because I was tired of driving three miles to my in-laws house just to check my e-mail and get online make calls, etc. So here were my barriers.
First there was price. I haven’t worked for a year, having sold my car and living on the proceeds here in Costa Rica. iPhones are not cheap. I do not like spending a lot of money on something that is easy to lose/break and isn’t a content creative tool. Most of the iPhones that are 3g and unlocked/jailbroken on E-Bay are in the $300–$600 range (there’s a distinction one discovers in the journey (jailbroken is far easier than unlocked). I write this April 2, 2010, the firmware 3.13 with a codbase whatever you are pretty much S.O.L. from what I understand (unless it was upgraded through Pwnage. I bought an AT&T phone that wasn’t unlocked or anything for only $200. This was kind a of a risk because I had to have it sent to someone in the states then shipped to me without checking it out on AT&T to see if it actually works. Well, guess what, it came to me cracked. She mentioned scratches on the back, but actually never said there was a crack on the back on the bottom or that the camera doesn’t work or the WiFi. Buyer beware on e-bay especially iPhones.
No wi-fi not working when you are trying to unlock a phone turns out to be a BIG deal, BlackRa1n and GeoHot’s “easy solution” don’t work. I finally found an iphoneexplorer app and BB forum on cell phones that worked in India that involved dragging over blacksn0w.dylib and com.apple.CommCenter.plist I barely know what these things are and when I tried dragging these over into iphone explorer on the PC and it was crashing it and not dragging over. On the Mac however it crashed iPhone explorer .93 but still dragged the files over. After maybe 40 hours spread out of 2 weeks (I had given up, no WIFI on the iPhone was a real pain, not many solutions anywhere), this Indian work around was my last hope, before I was going to send my phone back to the States to a buddy who was going to give it a go (we both suspect the crack on the back of the phone was disconnecting the antennae).
Well, I have it now and am writing from the end of the dirt road in the mountains. If you are in Costa Rica and need to get your iPhone to work, give me a holler, I am available. I felt that some of them purposely told false information in order to get people to accidentally upgrade to 3.1.3 perhaps blogs being sponsored by AT&T and Apple.
iPhone is not available at all in Costa Rica through standard ways, so….
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My wife and I have relocated to CR from USA. Prior to leaving the states I purchased an iphone from at&t.
Unfortunately, we didn’t check out roaming charges having been made to believe it was global, as is, under normal charges. Buyer Beware! Anyway, we have purchased someone’s sim card and we are able to use as CR phone locally. Certainly would like to have all of the apps. Any ideas you can give us will be greatly appreciated. I admire your tenacity.
Buddy
Cydia is what people use to download Apps on jailbroken phones, and of course the iPhone App Store. I have set a goal to download one app a day as I am trying to get into iPhone app development. , I have been tethering mine to a Mac with 3G. Not sure if the chip you got from someone was 3g or not. If you are looking for internet you will need that. Not sure how long you have been down here and/or how important the phone number you have is for you, but from what I heard, it will be possible to change your phone number from a GSM to a 3G number keeping your old number after April 19th.
Currently I am using Skype and can actually receive calls on it on my iPhone etc…
Make sure that you don’t accidentally upgrade to 3.1.3 that is the kiss of death for iPhones currently (maybe someone will be able to crack it eventurally).
I’m using a 3G iPhone on ICE with no problems (3.1.2 firmware). However, I’m still trying to figure out how (and if) I can get tethering working through ICE. There is the AT&T tethering hack you can download, but I’m hesitant to do it because I don’t want to restore everything if it doesn’t work. Anyone else have any luck with tethering an iPhone in Costa Rica?
It’s posts like this that keep me coming back and checking this site regularly, thanks for the info!
great post as usual!
Costa Rica 3g USB Tethering of My iPhone through ICE Internet Access No WiFi Travis Winn best post. I has been collection in my blog. 2010/03/03
Can you tell me how you did it?? I am looking to do the same….
So, you’re telling me that I can use my iPhone to connect my computer to the internet anywhere I have phone service in Costa Rica? I’m an absolute novice with this kind of stuff, but I was able to jailbreak and unlock my 2g on 3.1.3, with little difficulty through jailbreakme.com. Would you mind giving just a little more detail, as I will be in Costa Rica in about 2 months, in a relatively remote area, and will be staying for about a year. I’d be very happy if I could use my laptop!
On my way to Costa Rica and wondered if you could pass along some help on getting my iPhone tethering working! Could you shoot me a message? Thanks!
I’m impressed after the hell I went through with a 3G Android for my girlfriend. Welcome to “paradise”.
Hello,
Found your site via a google search for iPhone usage in Costa Rica. My wife and I are moving to San Francisco de San Isidrio in February and we both have iPhones (currently living in CA). We will be living in CR for at least two years, but I am now worried about our ability to use our phones. I, too, use Macs and I am fairly used to the jb world, but our phones aren’t currently jb’n. So, will ICE work with only Jb phones? Should we discontinue our AT&T account? That would be a lot of $ for early termination. Also, I’m curious as to your musical endeavors. I play keys and some guitar, drums, etc and would love to meet up with some musical minds once we get there. We’ve never been to CR and are just jumping in headfirst. So even if you are hours away, it would be cool to have anyone with some semblance of music, American life, etc once we get down there. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I think we are excited and a bit scared at the same time. Thanks for any possible connection.
Hi, Well, you will most likely need to cancel your AT&T account but don’t worry about it until then. I would definitely Jailbreak and most importantly “unlock” your account. I did this post in April of 2010 and things are a lot easier now. My original difficulty with my phone was that it didn’t have WiFi and therefore didn’t unlock. In order to use your iPhones here you will definitely need an unlock (distinct from jailbreaking, jailbreaking is easy, unlocking is sometimes harder). In SF you should be able to hire someone to do it for $25.
Now they have Kolbi Prepaid plans which are pretty cool. I am using it on my iPhone and then bought a Datacard for wireless unlimited 3G access and it works really good. It’s not advertised, but I have been able to pop that card in my iPhone which is nice since nobody calls me locally much here, and I can surf the net unlimited…
Stay in touch! Travis
Sorry for the slow reply… yes, Costa Rica can be a piece of work sometimes, but somehow after about a year I have gotten used to it. L.A. took me about four years to become accustomed to in the states. Go figure!
I recommend MyWi on an iPhone, you’ll need a 3G chip, too… you can get a Kolbi 3G… I recommend buying a dataCard, and using it for both surfing the net, (the Datacard seems to work better than the 3G through a phone) plus it runs your iPhone really hot. I also recommend avoiding giving a representative of ICE your phone, they like doing proprietary programming on it. They have a new law effective in September 2010 that says they only officially support iPhone 3GS and not 3G, but if you just buy a prepaid card it will work but you have to pay data as you use it, not unlimited, hence I recommend getting a Datacard and hooking up an unlimited chip and switching out. You might need a cedula or permanent residency to get that line though… some things don’t change!
Hey Travis, thanks for this post,
I am a pro poker player currently living in Tamarindo. I need to ensure the internet doesn’t go out by having 2 internet lines, one being the local cable service and I was hoping the other would be the cellular via my iphone through ICE. Unfortunately I have broadband 02.10.04 which seems to be impossible to unlock via my research. Also how can someone that is only on a tourism stay in Costa Rica get a data plan? Do they sell these via your sim card? I asked about a USB plugin device and the answer is you must be a resident to obtain such a thing.
Any help is much appreciated!