Setting Up Communications

We arrived in Mexico City on Wednesday as planned. Although it is impacting some friends and former colleagues back home, the government shutdown did not affect us -- good thing since there would be nothing worse than sitting at home without personal belongings or a car. As the situation wears on, it will assuredly have more and more of an impact. But, enough of that, back to Mexico...

The Apartment

The apartment is fairly spacious. It has a large room that the furniture arrangement divides into a dining room and living room, a large kitchen, two bathrooms, and two bedrooms. It even has a few ceiling fans and there is an underground parking space assigned to the apartment.

Electricity, water, and gas were already turned on when we arrived. The phone line has not been reconnected, but hopefully we'll get that taken care of shortly. As per standard, we are on our own to acquire television and Internet service if we want it and want it we do. Actually, as I write this entry on Saturday morning, the Totalplay technician is here working to get our service up and running. It's already involved a few trips up to the roof of the apartment complex.

There are various Internet/television services that you can get here in Mexico City. Some companies offer packages that include telephone (VoIP), television, and Internet service while some only offer one or two of the services. Some of the popular services are Telmex, Cablevision, Totalplay, and Sky; availability varies throughout the city. Totalplay is one of those companies like Comcast or Verizon Fios that offers all three. Like Verizon Fios, which is what we have back home, Totalplay provides service via fiber optic cables. I'm sure I'll comment on the service in the future and, of course, feel free to ask, but one thing I liked about this was that the advertising and services felt familiar. Some others have also reported good things about it, so hopefully it will work out well.

Mobile Communications

Like with television and Internet, there are also several cellular service options in Mexico City. The company with the greatest market share is TelCel. Another popular option is MoviStar, and yet a third option is iUSACell, which I know very little about. After looking at the TelCel and MoviStar websites, it looks like MoviStar is significantly cheaper than TelCel for prepaid plans. Ideally, we would be able to put a Mexican SIM card in our unlocked U.S. phones, put money on the account, and use away! Unfortunately, things haven't worked out that smoothly so far.

Thursday evening we went to the large MoviStar store on Presidente Masaryk, one of the larger, ritzier streets in Polanco. We informed the associate who greeted us that we wanted to purchase a SIM card for our phone. They issued us a number and we waited all of about 20 seconds before an associate was available to help us. We explained to her what we wanted to do. She said that the "chip" (micro SIM card) itself would be 80 pesos and gave us a prepaid plan brochure. For 200 pesos, we could get 500 minutes and 250 MB of data for general navigation that we would have 30 days to use or lose. Beyond the 250 MB of general data, data for some apps, like Facebook, would be unlimited. Beyond this, we could purchase additional minutes or data. To put this price in context, this is about $17 for 30 days of service or about a fourth of what I pay at home. At home, however, I get unlimited data, of which I use at most 1 GB since most of the time I am at a place that has Wifi.

Back to Thursday evening... The associate suggested that we try the SIM card in the phone before paying anything. They put the card in the phone. It readily received a phone signal but we were unable to get the data to work. We're looking into what the issue might have been, but we're also going to try TelCel.
Out of curiosity, we looked at the cost of the Samsung S4 and S3 phones under a prepaid service arrangement (i.e., not under a plan that would subsidize the cost of the phone somewhat). The S4 was 12,000+ pesos, which is about $1,000. The S3 was 3,000-some pesos ($300+), much more reasonable, but still a lot of money to spend for a new phone when you have a perfectly good phone already.

Internet Installation

It took nearly 6 hours, but Internet service and telephone service are up and running. Television service was a bit trickier. The technician swore it was not working due to a service outage, but after looking on the company's website, we found a guide that allowed us to correct program the remote for the TV signal decoder. Voila! All three services are working.