Networking
Buy and sell networking in Costa Rica.
The fibre box your provider installs covers one end of the house; routers, mesh kits and extenders are what carry the signal to the rest of it. Concrete-block walls, which is how most Costa Rican homes are built, stop Wi-Fi far sooner than wood or drywall, so an upstairs bedroom often needs more than the router alone. Past the point where the fibre runs out, a Starlink kit does the job of the whole line. New and pre-owned gear sits side by side, from a small-office switch to a router retired for a faster one.
Concrete-block walls and the mesh kit:
one router in the living room rarely reaches the far bedroom of a block house, let alone the upstairs. A cheap extender plugged in halfway repeats the signal, but single-band ones listen and repeat on the same radio, so the far room gets bars and little speed. A mesh kit such as TP-Link Deco or Mercusys Halo spreads matching units round the house that act as one network, and a phone moves between them without dropping a video call. Mesh works best with the units joined by a network cable, and in a block house one cable up the stairwell does more than an extra unit. A shared NAS drive for the house sits under storage and hard drives.
Switches and ceiling access points for cabins and offices:
a small office or a row of tourist cabins outgrows a home router fast. An unmanaged gigabit switch turns one port into many for desktops and a network printer from printers. Ceiling access points from TP-Link Omada or Ubiquiti UniFi cover a reception and a garden from one controller, and most take power down the network cable from a PoE switch or a small injector, so the ceiling needs no socket.
Starlink kits where the fibre stops:
on a finca outside Upala or a lot at the end of a gravel road, the dish is the line. The standard kit has a separate router and suits a fixed home; the Mini has the router built in and packs into a bag for a car, a boat or a weekend house. Both need open sky, and a tall tree on one side shows up as dropouts in the app. The plan is separate from the hardware: the new owner signs up for their own.
Wi-Fi 6 routers at the bottom of the shelf:
a new Wi-Fi 6 router from TP-Link or Mercusys starts around ₡30,000, and a two-unit mesh kit from about ₡35,000. With new gear that cheap, a plain used router from a few years back is worth little; larger mesh sets, business access points and anything still getting firmware updates keep a price. Starlink is the exception. The standard kit costs around ₡200,000 new and a used one with a clean transfer still fetches real money.
Dead Ethernet ports and abandoned firmware on a used router:
a surge down the line in a storm can kill one Ethernet port and leave the Wi-Fi working. Plug a laptop into every port, the internet one included. Read the model and hardware version off the label and look them up on the maker’s support page: a router that no longer gets security updates should be priced like one. Ask for the original power adapter, since a stray one with the wrong output is how routers die. A mesh set needs every unit, reset to factory so it leaves the previous owner’s app. With a Starlink, ask whether the kit was bought outright or rented with the plan; a rented kit has to be bought out before it can be transferred.
Before handing over a mesh set or a Starlink:
copy the model and hardware version from the label, give the Wi-Fi generation, and for a mesh set say how many units come and whether they ran on cable. Photograph the back panel so the ports show. Someone collecting a mesh set in Grecia will want to watch each unit light up and join, so have them plugged in before they arrive. For a Starlink, say which kit it is, that you own it, and that every cable and the mount are in the box. Keep your plan running until the buyer is there: show the dish online in the app, then cancel and press Transfer while they watch, factory-reset the router and hand over the Starlink identifier.