If you are new to Costa Rica it is nice to know before arriving how to stay in touch with your families back home. Almost everyone with a cell phone in Costa Rica communicates with What'sApp, which allows for free messaging, voice and video calls, while you are on wifi. If you are an iPhone user (and so are your friends and family) then iMessage and Facetime work great on wifi.

We have a couple of older iPhones we bring down here, and we install a costa rican chip (1000 colones, less than $2) that gives us a costa rican phone number, for making local calls. The chip needs to be recharged if you use the cell service very much (these are prepago (prepaid) chips that need to have minutes purchased). We actually have two older iPhones so we buy a MoviStar chip for one and a Claro chip for the other so we have good cell service in most places with at least one phone, and my US phone with TravelPass turned on usually has service almost everywhere. Costa Rica has at least 3 cell providers that I am aware of: Kolbi, Claro, and MoviStar. Depending on where you are different chips may work better than another. Claro and MoviStar both work great at the condos.

Depending on your service provider for your regular phone (we use Verizon) you may be able to use your US phone here just like at home in the US using Verizon's TravelPass, however that costs $10/day. If you have TravelPass setup, it is convenient for traveling, and you just need to keep your phone in airplane mode for the days that you do not need it. Most of the services on an iPhone work great on wifi, What'sApp, iMessage, and Facetime. I like having the ability to turn off airplane mode in an emergency and pay the $10 for 24 hours when I need it.

Android phone will work great with What'sApp on wifi.

Our condo has high speed (fiber optics) internet and a small flat screen TV that you can connect via an HDMI cable to your laptop. We are able to use entertainment services such as Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Video, etc. via the laptop hooked to the tv. We have found that it is sometimes necessary to use a VPN (I use ExpressVPN) to allow certain content to be showed while you are here in Costa Rica. But with the fiber Wifi, the speeds are great to be able to watch most services..

If you want to watch entertainment on the small flat screen TV in the main living area, be sure to bring an HDMI cable that works with your laptop. (we do not leave one here)