Not too many years ago, public Wi-Fi hotspots were a rarity. As the market shifted to mobile devices, the demand for public Wi-Fi hotspots increased exponentially. Airports, hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, and bars quickly jumped on the band wagon to gain a competitive advantage. With our mobile devices, we look for public Wi-Fi hotspots. Mobile users rarely consider the dangers of a public Wi-...

A firewall is normally a software application (there are a few hardware firewalls) that protects an internal network, or a device, from unwanted intrusion (inbound firewall), and guards the traffic going to the network (outbound firewall). An inbound firewall is like a security guard, who checks your identity and belongings before you enter a building. Their job is to prevent unauthorized access t...

This article is necessary in the world that we live in today. The vast majority of smartphones, cellphones, and tablets are sold without having any antivirus or firewall protection, leaving you very open to getting attacked and losing personal information. With the rise of banking applications and a massive increase in the personal information being shared on your iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, or ano...

Ever since communications leviathan ICE was resigned to loosen its iron grip of the wireless spectrum in Costa Rica, The Costa Rica Star has dutifully followed the events, trying to make sense of it all. Bill Anderson, our resident tech guru and former U.S. Air Force comms officer has weighed in with his valuable expertise with a series of articles that demystify the world of electronic personal c...

As we saw in the last article, Wi-Fi uses radio frequencies as the medium of communications between the Wi-Fi router and devices on the Local Area Network (LAN). In some locations of my house, my tablet sees signals from the Casa Conde Hotel, which is over a block away. Radio signals do not stop at the walls of a building, or a property line. If the your Wi-Fi router is not secured, it is an open ...

We use the term Wi-Fi, but do we really know what it means. When looking at phone specifications, the Wi-Fi capabilities appear under WLAN (Wireless LAN), and LAN stands for Local Area Network. Don't you love acronyms that contain acronyms. Wireless tells us that we are using radio frequencies as the communications media. LAN tells that we are connecting multiple devices into a single network. To ...

The Internet is one huge network that is subdivided into many smaller networks. Internet routers connect multiple small networks together to a form a bigger network. Internet traffic routing is a fascinating subject, and complex subject. For our purpose, we only need to know the role a router plays in connecting multiple devices to a single address provided by our ISP. When you connect your Intern...

Whether for business or pleasure, having a connection to the Internet is part of our daily life. What happens, if you don't have a cable or WiFi connection to Internet? We carry a potential solution with us, and it is our cell phone. If your cell phone has a Web browser, it may act as a tether between another device and the Internet. Using your phone is a cost effective solution to purchasing a US...

When you connect to the Internet, your phone, data card, or cable modem, you are assigned a unique IP (Internet Protocol) address. The human readable form is a set of four numbers that are separated by a dot, such as 200.198.10.105. When an Internet application, not just your Web browser, makes a request to another Internet site, the site name resolves to the destination IP address. This establis...

The launch of the iPhone 4S in Costa Rica marks yet another step in this country's growing demand for smartphones. Apple always does a great job with launch publicity, but this time someone in Apple forgot to make sure that SUTEL has agreed with the launch of the iPhone 4S. A launch lunch turned into a meeting about non-compliance with SUTEL rules. Details like the iPhone's failure to have a plan ...

Whether on vacation or living in Costa Rica, the Internet is more than just a way to stay in touch with business. The internet is how we stay in touch with all our family friends, no matter where they are located. We live a mobile life style. As long as we can connect to Internet, we can chat, talk, and share photos. Our friends and family are part of our experience. The easiest way to connect ...

Once you have an unlocked GSM phone with a SIM card from either Kolbi, Claro, or Mobistar, you are ready to start using your phone. Costa Rica phone numbers are 8-digit phone numbers. A call to any number in Costa Rica is considered a local call. Some useful local phone numbers are: 911 – all emergencies 117 – police 118 – fire 113 – domestic directory assistance 114 – international directory...

From previous articles, we know that a cell phone must be an unlocked GSM phone that support the cell phone frequencies used in Costa Rica. If you don't have a phone that meets these criteria, then your choices are to rent a cell phone, buy a cell phone, or go without one during your vacation to Costa Rica. I tried the latter option, and survived about three days before buying a cell phone here in...

Thousands of web pages on the Internet decided to go dark today in protest against two bills before the legislature of the United States which could potentially limit your right to access and share digital content -such as the article you are now reading. The bills in question are known by seemingly harmless acronyms, SOPA and PIPA, which respectively stand for the Stop Online Piracy and Protect I...

So many sites on the Internet promote that SIM cards are only available to citizens and legal residents of Costa Rica. This is a myth. Every cell phone service offers both Prepaid (Prepago) and Postpaid (Postpago). Prepaid means that you are pay according to use, and postpaid (contract) means that you get a monthly bill based on different plans. Prepaid SIM cards are available to anyone over the a...

The previous article focused on compatibility with ICE/Kolbi. This article expands the discussion to include Claro and Movistar. Adding these to the mix means that we need to go from quadband (4 band) phones to pentaband (5 band) phones. By the end of the article, you should be able to match your phone, with the bands supported by a Costa Rica carrier. Think of a cell phone as a super deluxe ra...

Not every cell phone works in Costa Rica. Before coming to Costa Rica, you can verify that your phone meets the necessary requirements. It must support GSM, as CDMA and LTE phones do not work here. It must support the 1800 Mhz band. Your phones user manual should contain this information in the specifications section. For example, a quad-band phone would appear as GSM 850/900/1800/1900. The ...

In 2007, respected and influential Canadian sci-fi author William Gibson published Spook Country, a novel that underscores the byproducts of living in a highly-networked and globalized post-9/11 world of surveillance, fear and high-level horse trading exemplified by stranger-than-fiction occurrences such as the WikiLeaks affair and the Anonymous collective. Costa Rica is an important geograph...

Personal computing hardware has come a long way since the days of mainframes that used to take up entire rooms and bulky desktop PCs that required ugly pieces of workstation furniture that never seemed to match the home decor. The new personal computing paradigm is centered on mobility, portability and affordability. Smartphones and tablet computers are quickly replacing desktop PCs, and low-end...

More than 100 million text messages were exchanged by Ticos celebrating the New Year. According to a report appearing on the online news daily Costa Rica Hoy. Ticos also made a record number of wireless telephone calls on New Year's eve, about 15 million. The figures were provided by ICE, the former communications monopoly that remains the largest wireless carrier despite the divestiture enact...

Costa Rica's interest in space exploration has been growing over the last few years, and in 2011 three separate enterprises made significant strides in this field. Here's a look at those industrious organizations and the advances they made in 2011. For these three enterprises and their aspirational leaders, space is not Costa Rica's last frontier: it is the beginning of a bright future for Ticos ...

Ticos may have gone crazy over the iPhone in 2011, camping out outside of ICE offices and methodically signing up for innovative Kölbi plans which, while considered a good deal in Costa Rica, surprised people familiar with iPhone data plans offered in other countries. Ticos may have also gone crazy over the new Android smartphones, particularly when the new wireless reality kicked in, allowing ne...

More than one third of the population in Costa Rica went online and made use of various social media platforms during 2011, according to figures compiled by Social Bakers, a site dedicated to the statistical study of Internet social media usage. Facebook was the social network of choice among Ticos, followed by the short messaging and microblogging network Twitter. Other networks which had attract...

When it comes to conducting democratic elections, Costa Rica does not like to cut corners. After President Laura Chinchilla was elected in 2010, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (known as TSE for its acronym in Spanish) decided to completely modernize its ballot collection and counting processes. In November of 2010, the TSE adopted Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to improve the mon...

Apple may have finally decided to open up iTunes in Costa Rica and the rest of Latin America on December 13th, but it only took one day for a Tico-owned digital content store to follow suit. Central de Radios (CDR), a powerful media conglomerate which owns the venerable Radio Reloj and 29 other radio stations, launched Tití Online, the first store in Costa Rica to offer e-books, magazines, rington...

The recent losses of military unmanned aircraft over Iran and the Seychelles archipelago in the Indian Ocean call attention to the increased dependence by the United States on drone technology. While American drones are mostly used in covert strike missions and to spy on their own citizens, Costa Rica has learned to put drone technology to good use. The Center for the Investigation of Nuclear and...

Costa Rica's standing in the international community as an oasis of peace and democracy amidst the Central American powder keg of political instability and military conflict is fueling the imagination of leading video game developers. The constitutional ban on the military and the country's peaceful ways leave it wide open for bad guys with extremely nefarious motives to set up shop in Konami's...

The breakup of the communication monopoly held by the venerable Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (ICE) has had its share of supporters and detractors. Those who thought that all Ticos would celebrate the forced loosening of ICE's tight grip on wireless communications were a bit surprised by the old-hat attitudes of a few who welcomed new competitors Claro and Movistar with suspicion and eve...