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How easy is it for foreigners to integrate into Nicaraguan society?
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24%
No opinion
24%
Somewhat difficult
24%
Difficult
19%
Total votes: 21
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A Thought
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please
May look promisising but...
I wonder if Claro will be offering 4G service for the Granada area? As you say, Yota the only company previous offering 4G for only the Managua area.
Its a 4G cellular system stick
They say it works everywhere the 3G works.
List of areas covered (Cobertura) here:
http://www.claro.com.ni/wps/portal/ni/pc/personas/internet/internet-movi...
Scroll down through the Departmentos and you will see that the second Esteli Box (left column) should in fact be Granada.
We've got two towers in town, more or less, that I know of
One's at the Claro main store and the other one is about a quarter mile north of here on a little knoll, facility and tower built during the last year or so. If the third tower is further north near the actual town of Llano de la Cruz, it would be close to the military base.
Looks concentrated in cities. especially in Jinotega department where it's in Jinotega and no where else. And I don't see San Rafael del Norte anywhere.
People deciding to move to the country will be getting internet by other means, I think.
I've considered getting a land line but will probably wait to see where I end up.
Rebecca Brown
If It is Like...
...Verizon LTE 4G then due to speed you'll burn through your monthly allotment very quickly and will incur extra charges. Verizon is the best in the States but is extremely pricey. Sprint had a WiMax service that worked well as long as you were within the borders of it's set range. Unlimited data for a set price. Due to the even faster LTE service the others were introducing, which will eventually blanket the country, Sprint decided to stop introducing it's WiMax to new metro areas and develop their own LTE system. So far they haven't.
If it's a WiMax type service then it definitely matters where you live. There's some company from Miami setting up WiMax service in a number of Costa Rican cities.
Claro is smarter
You burn through your monthly allotment, they slow you down in speed. They know that if they tried the extra charges thingie, they'd be shit out of luck collecting. I could get close to unlimited by paying about $10 a month more, will see how they set up the 4G. Claro's customer base includes people who wouldn't be included in a lot of corporate thinking in the US (as with Amazon's decision not to allow anyone to buy a card from a US server/store and send it to a third world country to redeem in a third world Amazon site -- a huge market given the money and stuff that flows from the US to here). Claro sells anything from fifty cents worth of cell phone time on up to $100 a month plans for iPhones. They've also got an arrangement where the folks in the US can send money to phones in Nicaragua (works also for Movistar, too, I think). Carlos Slim isn't the richest man in the world for ignoring the bottom half of his markets.
When I set up cable with Cox in Fairfax County, I was doing it because Verizon's service for DSL was so absolutely awful. I asked the guy I was talking to if they'd ever heard that people went to Cox because of Verizon. "All the time," he said.
I prefer a dedicated line, prefer DSL to cable, but Cox cared and Verizon didn't. I don't have a lease here, go month to month, so the modem is the best I can get.
Rebecca Brown
Apple, not Amazon
Amazon is just fine with a US credit card and a Nicaraguan address. Apple is the company that won't let you use a US card if you're resident elsewhere and the CC company has that address.
Rebecca Brown
At one time i gave one of my
At one time i gave one of my credit card providers my Nic. address as a secondary address and then told an online vendor they could verrify the Nic. address with the credit card company. Worth a try if the online vendor`s website will let you add info to your order. I had to phone them.
After my first dealing with Correos and Aduanas I stopped ordering things from abroad except for books, and that I cut way back on because of the high shipping charges and the availability of ebooks.
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." Ayn Rand
My credit card co. has my NI address
They verify the NI address just fine and nobody except Apple has had any problem with that. Apple's vendors apparently force it to do something to filter for location and filtering by credit card loses them fewer sales than filtering by IP. What everyone else says is to buy gift cards (available through someone who does shipping US iTunes gift cards around the world) and set up a US Apple Store account (Apple informed me that this was against TOS and if they could find out, they'd terminate the account). What I wanted to buy from them were downloads. I basically found someone who had a spare copy of what I needed.
Since I don't plan to use the program, just need it for functionality of other parts of the OS (Apple broke that with the most recent upgrade), I don't really care.
Google does check IP addresses but they do sell Android Apps to people living with their US credit cards in Nicaragua. Amazon says I can't download some things (a few small press ebooks and The New Yorker appear to be about it). Adobe doesn't care, either. Nook/Barnes & Noble say outright that you can't buy and download things to your Nook when you're not in the US.
The theory among some net saavy friends is that Apple is jiving the suppliers and know that if it did filter by country IP, it would lose lots of sales.
I do have things shipped occasionally, and I want to be able to use my CC in Nicaragua without getting phone calls to verify.
Only books I buy are ones I can't get as ebooks and still want. I mainly ordered some camera gear, but once the Cameta order comes in, I'm pretty much set for a while. I'll probably get an unlocked Android phone when I'm back in the US sometime.
So far, no problems with Correos unless there's a discrepancy between the weight of the package and the declared weight of the package. Even that wasn't a huge deal. If I'd been willing to have gone to Managua and wasted a half day in the customs or mail warehouse, I could have avoided the payment on that, or so I was told. The big on-line camera stores know how to do things as they sell internationally all the time (B&H even has a Brazilina branch).
Apple also pulled the same thing on a guy in New Zealand who had an Australian card which had his New Zealand address as the address of record.
Apple should have more sense, but I'm rather glad that the Big Entertainment Industry people haven't realized Apple is straining out gnats and letting logs go through. I'll set up a US account sometime and use the iTunes cards. Apple doesn't sell iTunes gift cards in Nicaragua and only redeems the US bought ones to people who give them US addresses. I now know of several people who live elsewhere who set up US accounts with friends' addresses.
In case anyone wondered, don't bring an iPhone and US or Canadian CC here and expect to be able to change your address with Apple, not that you need to if you're just downloading. I suspect that if you buy an iPhone here, you'll need a Nicaraguan credit card to stay in terms of service for setting up an iTunes account. Android/Google doesn't appear to care as long as your address matches your IP.
I would rather deal with Aduano any day than to try to get Apple to consider that the policy isn't really going to keep anyone from faking them out if they filter by the credit card issuer's address rather than IP. Or even to make an exception to the rule because I could fax them my cedula, the card company knows I'm in Nicaragua.
Rebecca Brown
Our latest adventure with
Our latest adventure with Claro que No is the stepdaughter went into town to find out why we have not received our bill for satelite TV in over a month. Sad that customers have to keep track of a business business, but Claro is a sad outfit. She was told that they went to deliver the bill and nobody was home so they didn`t deliver it. My suspicion is that was the Claro lie of the day, as we had been getting out bill by email!
She further asked about our bad signal at times and was told their tower only serves 1 km. Sounds like a pretty whimpy signal to me. As the crow flies we are a direct line of sight of about 1.5 to 2 KM.
She forgot to ask if Claro que No can block the nuisance meassages. The worse ones are the ones they sent in the middle of the night--the beep and light flash woke up 2 family members the last time. Kinda sad you can`t even sleep in your own house.
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." Ayn Rand
But Verizon's Cellular Service...
...is recognized as the best in the U.S. by numerous outfits like Consumer's Digest, Consumer Reports, and Laptop Magazine. Not a plug for Verizon, I have Carlos Slim's Net10 pay as you go phone. Verizon put a huge investment in their 4G service, and apparently they want people to pay for the privilege of lightning fast speed. But I'd be satisfied with WiMax if it's fast enough to get Netflix through a VPN.
I also had their cell phone service
Didn't have any problems with that, but their DSL service in Fairfax County, VA, was in Cox Cable's best interests. Verizon probably wanted to get out of DSL at that point, anyway.
The first media sellers who figure out remittance culture and small payments markets as well as Carlos Slim did with phones will leave Apple in the dust (Apple refuses to redeem gift cards other than in the country store they were bought in -- so if a US resident buys iTunes gift cards and sends them to Singapore, the Singapore resident has to have set up a fake US address and US Apple store account to use them, which it seems that most people in the world just do). Claro has phones from $15 to $900, with plans to match (you can put anything from 10 Cordobas up on the pre-paid phones, and folks in the US can put credit on Nicaraguan phones, too.
My US phone is a Net10, wonder if the card is still good and the number unchanged. Didn't know Carlos Slim owned them now; I think they were under T-Mobile when I got mine (or is T-Mobile also a Carlos Slim company).
I probably want to get an unlocked phone next trip to the US,
Rebecca Brown
Read a USAToday Article...
...about Slim that mentioned his various U.S. enterprises. I had been a Net10 user for a couple of years and knowing he was involved confirmed why it has been a very good service. Especially when they started offering 750 minutes a month for just $25. Back in the 90's used to spend $150 a month on long distance on a landline.
I still have an account but the phone is listed as....
...unactivated. I'll reactivate it and throw some money on it before I go back to the fatherland.
I'm not sure what Claro would charge me for roaming, and I'd rather not find out, but they did find my phone when I was last in the US and sent it all the spam messages.
Rebecca Brown
spam is right
they are sending about 150 messages a month now!
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." Ayn Rand
If I don't put prepago money on the phone....
...and just use the contract minutes, I don't appear to get the spam. I'll have to turn on the other Claro phone that's prepago only and see what I've got. Need to put more credit on it sometime to keep the number, but it's basically just a spare phone and even if the other phone was stolen, I can get the number put on a new chip and use it in the spare phone.
Next time I'm in the US, I want to get an unlocked phone, then I just have to carry the chips.
Rebecca Brown
From what I gather,. land
From what I gather,. land lines in Esteli work as good as anything is going to work here. Our neighborhood does not have land lines available and our Moviestar modem did not work at all of 4 separate attempts, so we went with Claro g3 on an 18 month contract, which was renewed when we got the new modem. As above, service is crap. surprizingly, our satelite TV from Claro works just fine, as does our cell phone reception.
Today I was downtown and bought an extention to hang the modem from the ceiling. Can`t tell if it does any good as the service is so erratic from minute to minute, but will give it try.
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality." Ayn Rand