[gydrorway]

Oh well, it appears from rubio's post above that there was no need for me to spend the extra pesos and hassle of upgrading to Full service. But I've got no complaints. I'm now using my iPhone as a Personal Hotspot for my iPad to send this message. The tethered iPad is 5 times faster on the Claro service than it was on my hotel's WiFi. But unlike rubio's experience with his Android, I did not have to adjust any APN settings on my iPhone. I don't even know how you would do that on an iPhone. I simply inserted the cut-to-size Claro SIM card, turned on the iPhone, and gave it about a minute to find the new service.

After my 6th day here in Sosua, I noticed that my download speed is now only 150-300 Kbps (upload speed is still over 1 Mbps), even though my iPhone is still showing a strong 5-bar 3G Claro signal. So apparently they have throttled back my speed as tjsadler described in a previous post. But unlike tjsaddler, I think I got about 4 or 5 days of fast speed at 2 to 3 Mbps before the speed got throttled. Interestingly, I thought I had been cut off altogether last night because my phone wouldn't do anything and was showing "no service". I thought at first that perhaps Claro was experiencing a temporary service outage. But this morning I still had no service until I cycled the phone on and off. Then suddenly the service was back, but still only at speeds of 150-300 Kbps.

One topic that I haven't seen addressed in this thread is how this prepaid data plan integrates with voice minutes. I ran out of voice minutes after only a couple of days and less than 10 minutes of voice time. I was going to try to recharge my phone for voice minutes by going through the *111# menu until I realized that I would probably have to give them a credit card number. The more I thought about this, the more I convinced myself that offering my credit card to Claro might not be a wise thing to do. So I have simply continued using data (which is primarily why I wanted the plan anyhow), and I have a MagicJack app that I use for calling whenever I'm in a wifi zone. By the way, that MagicJack app works great. Calls back home to the United States are free, and calls to mobile phones in the DR cost 16 cents per minute.