Claro Costa Rica Locates a Retail Outlet for Service of Cell Phones in Playas del Coco, Costa Rica

By Helen Dunn Frame

America Movil ‘s unit Claro Costa Rica will open a retail location for service of cell phones in Costa Rica next to the Coldwell Banker Coast to Coast office in the Central Plaza across from Banco Nacional in Playas del Coco, Guanacaste.   Last June the company received authorization from Costa Rica's Comptroller General to launch operations in the local market,

America Movil , Latin America’s largest wireless carrier, operating as Claro Costa Rica will compete with the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad  (ICE) and Spain's Telefonica (Movistar.)   ICE heretofore has controlled wireless and fixed line business in the country with 2.6 million cell phone lines.

Controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim, the parent company of Claro Costa Rica now has access to its eighth market in the Central America- Caribbean region where it had 16.8 million subscribers at the end of September 2011. That represented 7.7 percent of its wireless lines across the Western hemisphere. America Movil also operates in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.

With the exception of Cuba, Costa Rica is the last Latin American country with a state telecommunications monopoly, according to its regulator the Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones (SUTEL).  Ending ICE's four-decade-old monopoly of cell phones in Costa Rica was one of the conditions to enter the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, or CAFTA, which took effect in Costa Rica in 2009