By Annette Carter
Special to A.M. Costa Rica

After years of living in the dark ages, high speed Internet has finally come to the seaside village of Cahuita on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast.  The community might be the first in Costa Rica to be  covered by what is called a wireless cloud.

Until now, Internet users have had only one way to get online — through a dial-up service at a maximum speed of 56 kbps.

Radiográfica Costarricense S.A. provided that service. The company is a subsidiary of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, the government-owned telecommunications monopoly.

Now users with their own laptops can go online using wireless or WiFi technology provided by the newly opened Jungle Internet Café.  Customers using the café’s computers have access to the same technology.  The Jungle Café is the second opened on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast by California couple Jimmy Brake and his wife, Linda Lee, and their partner, Colombian Nicolay Bent de Armas.  The first café has been operating in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca since February last year.

De Armas explained that the technology begins with a satellite dish.  The dish brings the Internet connection to a server for all the computers in the Café and an antenna provides the signal to other nearby computers that have wireless capability, he said.

Currently the signal extends 400 meters (about 1,300 feet) from the café which is located in the center of Cahuita across from the city park and above the Restaurant Coral Reef. The coverage may be expanded later by adding repeaters throughout the area. The speed is a hefty 400 kbps compared to the 56k of a dial-up connection. Speed in Puerto Viejo runs higher at 1,000 kbps, de Armas said.

Brake and Lee have been coming to Puerto Viejo for two to three months each year for several years.  In their hometown of Oakland, California the couple operates DW Alliance, a web-based technology company, from their home and liked the idea of working from the Caribbean for part of the year.  But they soon found it wasn’t so easy.

Users buy increments of time from 15 minutes to 10 hours which is metered on the Web site and can be used from either Jungle Café location or on a personal laptop computer.

The Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad is starting to offer high speed DSL internet access known as Acelera to residents of Cahuita.  The service connects at speeds ranging from 128 kpbs to 4,096 kbps and costs from $28.25 to $327.70 per month depending on the plan purchased. The hookup requires a land-based telephone line and a special modem for the computer.

Several businesses in the Central Valley provide wireless systems for commercial customers. However, Cahuita is small enough to be covered by a single setup.

Elsewhere, whole U.S. counties are covered by wireless clouds that allow computers with wireless access to get on the Internet anywhere.

“We couldn’t run our business from here because the Internet was really really slow,” Brake said. “And we met other people who were in the same boat.”

A systems engineer, Brake knew what needed to be done.  At about that time, de Armas who moved to the Caribbean coast from the Colombian island of San Andreas two years ago had been working in computer maintenance for a dial-up Internet café in Puerto Viejo and began to think of opening his own operation using faster technology but he needed a partner.

The two met each other and hit if off, Brake said.  Now de Armas handles all the management and day to day operations while Brake takes care of the Web site from California.  “Our plan is to unite Cahuita, Puerto Viejo and Manzanillo with WiFi,” said de Armas.  Brake said they expect to open the third Jungle Café in Manzanillo in the fall.