Our ICT Committee put up a wikispaces page:
http://techguidecr.wikispaces.com/Introduction
Per the following article it costs $.33/minute for a 512kb connection.
http://techguidecr.wikispaces.com/Internet+on+Cell+Phones
Although some PCVs still have GSM phones in CR, the majority are moving to Internet enabled 3G phones, which is being helped by newly allowed competition in the telecommunications industry (Claro and Moviestar just arrived in the past year to compete with deregulation in this area).
The reason I mentioned the disaster preparedness in the SMS communications is that a couple of months ago we had a major earthquake in Guanacaste (7.6 on the Richter scale). Thankfully only one person was killed during the quake, but it could have reached hundreds or even thousands in a worst case scenario.
When a disaster of this magnitude happens you need to get communication out as quickly as possible. The PC office split into teams and made calls to all PCVs, to make sure that everyone was accounted for. However, the organizing of this and the calls took hours to actually reach everyone and could have been streamlined better.
The former company that I worked for had implemented a service called One Call Now. I was thinking that the solution for the SMS issue with communicating with parties and having some sort of history of these calls could also include a sort of disaster response aspect, where you could blast out calls and/or SMS to multiple parties at once, making the responses and tracking much more streamlined.
Hope this answers the question about disaster planning/mitigation responses.
Stephen