Dominican Dongles?

I've used an Orange USB dongle. Cost about 2K to buy, each 24 hour period is 128 pesos - refillable at Orange or via ezetop. Good thing about Orange's pay-as-you-go option is that they don't cut you off after hitting the 1G limit, they *might* throttle you down to lower but still usable speed though (256Kb/s). Also, they are not too strict about the 24 hour limit either - if you keep the connection open, you can easily go for a week (in fact I went for a full month once) - my sense is they are not too good about keeping track of open sessions but your mileage may vary. Coverage is great in the cities (Santiago, SD), less so but still decent on the coast. Great option if you are on a laptop and the light goes off as you still have the Internet.

I skype every week with my parents in Belgium, through Orange flybox. 99% of the time I can videoskype perfectly, without any delays. Once in a while you get an echo. End the conversation, and reconnect, and normally it is solved.

If you take their cheapest plan, I think it is cc. 1,000 rds, and 1,000 rds as deposit for the modem, which you get back at the end of the contract.

BelgianK

You need to explain this better for me. SO they buy the dongle for 2k then they need to charge it and so for 10 days it would be 1280RD$. This 24 hour period has to be continuous or you can use 2 hours a day for 12 days to total the 24 hours? I'm confused on how this works, surely some things are more costly? Say you were streaming a film? say you were just browsing? say you were just skyping?

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Once the 24 hour period starts, the money for that one day (128 pesos) is taken off the balance of the account. You can use it for 1 minute or for the whole 24 hours, it's the same 128 pesos (100 + 28% tax). Officially, the amount of data transfered is up to 1GB - don't recall the speed but about 2 megabit per second in both directions (equivalent to 256 kilobytes per second), and then they might throttle you down to 256 kilobit/s for the remainder of the period. Claro has a plan for 200MB daily at half the price but they cut you off completely after reaching the limit. Wind's daily limit is 4G but the coverage is very limited and more expensive (125 + tax).

When I use a dongle, I tend to refill a day at a time (or 5$ via ezetop) and then refill more when I can no longer get a connection. At some point if you use it a lot, flybox becomes a more economical option but it's at least a 12 months plan and the monthly bandwidth limit is low.

If you use skype video or streaming a movie, you will hit that 1GB limit faster - the Orange window has a byte counter for the current session, and then the speed would drop. In my experience, these limits are not enforced too strictly, at least for now: I would often go to 3-5Gb on a day.