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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

That's out of date. They ran fiber down the Pacific coast when the highway was paved, and it doesn't cost that much to get a connecting line run to your house (source, did this a few months ago, have reliable symmetric 75Mb).

Power is a larger concern - in rainy season we've been having outages several times a week, though most are short. That will vary based on location.

In any case, if renting a house, check for fiber & check whether they have a generator or a few UPSes at least.

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Suppose you have a reliable generator system and your own house's power has reliable uptime. Would the internet still function during power outages? (The upstream telco equipment might lose power during an extended outage.)

Another HNer mentioned Costa Rica's internet connections during power outages, hence my question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28169281

I guess it depends on where you are and how wide the outage is. Most of our power outages are extremely local (we're in the middle of the jungle and trees come down during heavy rain), and usually resolved within a couple of hours. So far our internet has been consistently up, as long as we've been able to keep power on at the network cabinet and router.

There's also good LTE (as a fallback) in many villages that cater to tourists, but coverage is spotty as you get more remote.

Hey there, you linked my comment, figured I'd fill you in a bit

Again I don't really see power outages last longer than an hour or so, but my laptop manages to run for about 2 hours with a 4g modem in it. I used to be able to go even longer with an extra battery back when laptops still had those -- So really as long as you're not lugging around a UPS and desktop for some reason you should be good for at least that much time.

If it's out longer than a day I pretty much just pack my stuff and head into the city. I recognize most people don't really have this kind of luxury with the kind of work they do but I specifically worked my way to this point where I can afford to do this and maybe if you stretch your imagination in terms of possibilities you can too

How hard would it be to get 1GBs symmetric?

That would be several thousand bucks a month, but there are numerous companies in the city that would run the fiber to your house. I had 50/50 and was paying $300 with a company called fibernet, but I dropped that in favor of a 300/20 + a 100/10 backup/load balanced at my house in the city.

IIRC it should be doable, though it would be expensive. I believe the line that I paid for (which I get to resell infrastructure costs to any neighbors who want to join after the fact) has a capacity over 1Gb.

You will be limited by backbone and inter-country connections. Having 1 GBit to Costa Rica servers won’t be that useful.

This is unfortunately the real bottleneck

Either way I've come to view bandwidth that high as something great if you're running severs or whatever but kind of overkill if all you need is enough for a small home office

For symmetric fibre for business you might want to look at this company's business offerings: https://www.data.cr/ but other than that you're only going to find that in data centres

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