Phones For Everybody

photo: Karen Lee Hall

By Don Mateo 

Next time you are walking in the city, or in your barrio, or at the beach or in the campo, observe how many people are in public glued to their telephones. As this is one of the most common sights in present day Costa Rica it may seem hard to believe that it was once a wait of months, or even years, to get a private telephone line. But it’s true: My first years here in the early 1990s were spent mostly in rural areas. There was no landline service and cellular service was expensive and limited. 

Most small towns had a communal public phone in a pulperia or cantina. You paid each call by the minute and calls made to countries outside of Costa Rica could become expensive in a hurry. While many houses in the greater San Jose area had landline phones, once you headed for the provinces the number of phones per household dwindled. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that a 7th digit was added to phone numbers, to accommodate the growing demand for phone service.

Rural areas still suffered. While the more populated parts of the country were getting easier access to landlines and cell service slowly improved, out in the campo we were stuck with the equivalent of two dixie cups and a string. The nearest public phone could be up to a thirty minute drive. Small towns that offered phone service would have signs as you entered, with the name of the town and an outline of a telephone to indicate that a -- as in one –- phone was available somewhere in the town.

Telephone and electricity were both monopolies then, as written in the 1949 constitution. It took a vote in 2008 to open the phone system up to competition, which immediately did two things: first it brought in other cell phone companies and offered consumers some options; and second, it freed ICE to no longer be a cash cow for the Costa Rican government. Though many in the country voted against it, as ICE was considered by many to be part of the National Patrimony, the vote in favor of opening the markets turned out to be a win-win situation. By 2009, demand was so great that an eigth digit was added to all phones.

Today, Costa Rica has some of the highest rates of Internet and mobile phone usage in Central America, with millions of mobile connections, and internet now available in even the most remote rural areas that only a couple decades before had had one public phone for the entire village. So this Christmas season, when you whip out your phone to pass along some holiday photos or send a WhatsApp message to somebody half a world away, say Gracias a Dios for those changes that made the telephone accessible to all.the entire village. So this Christmas season, when you whip out your phone to pass along some holiday photos or send a WhatsApp message to somebody half a world away, say Gracias a Dios for those changes that made the telephone accessible to all.

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