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I am a developer from Amsterdam and I have employers who pay me while I am developing from abroad. The experience is great, I get to see many many things without the need to touch my saving, but in order to live this way it is essential that I have access to wifi at least 3 days a week and that I should not need to worry about my belongings getting stolen.

Does anybody know what the wifi is like in the following regions:

  • Chile
  • Bolivia
  • Peru
  • Panama
  • Costa Rica
  • Nicaragua

From my experience when a hostels says that they have wifi that it is not always that reliable. Also, if possible I would like to know how safe it is to bring my laptop to work in a country. I will always carry the laptop on me while traveling or leave it at a hostel (I tend to only book hostels that have a secure locker or rent out an appartment at airbnb.com).

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  • I wish I had your job! If one day you liked to offer your job to another one please bear me in mind! I am serious! :)
    – Persian Cat
    Mar 3, 2013 at 19:36
  • 1
    travel.stackexchange.com/a/14096/3411 Think about Coworking
    – greg121
    Mar 3, 2013 at 20:20
  • Regarding hostels, you can browse reviews on e.g. Hostelworld—if the wifi is really crappy, often someone has mentioned it. Other than that, don't pay for more than one night in advance if you don't know what the facilities are like :) If the wifi turns out dysfunctional, it's usually easy to change to another hostel.
    – Jonik
    Mar 3, 2013 at 20:32
  • Hostelbookers and Trip advisor and Google also have hostel reviews. It would be great if there were some central resource to see all reviews of a hostel but in the meantime I recommend using all the sites if you really want to know.
    – hippietrail
    Mar 4, 2013 at 23:49
  • How was your Internet & travel experience through these nations? Please share
    – Alex S
    Dec 4, 2015 at 5:22

1 Answer 1

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I don't know the current situation about Wifi in those countries but I am a developer and I've travelled in all of them. I did not have a laptop nor did I do any work but once in a while I did some coding just to keep my brain in shape and learn new things.

I general expect the Wifi to be better in Chile and Costa Rica than in the other countries and again its better in urban areas than out in the country.

I agree, the Wifi in hostels can be sketchy or non-existent. There are two things you can try:

  1. Set up your complete development environment locally on the laptop, possibly in VMs and try to work offline. Maybe mock some services you can not have locally. Use local (distributed) source control and then sync with the office once in the evening or every other day. Working offline you realise how dependent you are on online resources and Stack Overflow. Bring local help files or e-books. So even if you can't work offline all the time, there may be parts of your work that can be done offline and you can work where-ever you want.

  2. Use internet cafes, they are all over the place and even though they may not have Wifi you could just pay for a computer and then use the LAN cable with your laptop. Many of these place are pretty shitty, so look around a bit and you'll find decent ones with good connections. I usually just paid for the whole day to reserve my spot over lunch or other breaks. In countries like Bolivia this cost me as little as 1 Euro per day. But the costs shouldn't be a big concern when you are actually making money.

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