Boccas del Torre(Panama)-phone service, etc.
 

I'll be in Boccas del Torre for 4 months beginning in January and wanted to know about what kind of phone service I need to have to be able to make calls back to the U.S. (and received calls)
satellite phone?

When we were in Bocas (del Toro), we bought phone cards and used them easily.

Were the phone cards compatible with your cell phone? (we currently have Verizon as our wireless carrier)

I used pay phones with the phone cards. It is very simple. Of course, if someone needed to call me, they called my cell phone--I was with Cingular then, now ATT.
It was extremely expensive to do that, so I asked that no one call me unless there was an emergency. I was the one to do the calling/checking in.

For example, a 40 minute call was billed about $120 on my cell bill.

If you have an unlocked cel phone that works on the GSM 850 band then you can buy a SIM card for a prepaid account with either Cable & Wireless or Movistar - not sure if one has better coverage in Bocas del Toro than the other...

Then when someone calls you - they pay the long distance and you pay nothing - outbound international calls aren't too expensive and you load your phone when they have triple or quadruple offers which seem to be weekly these days.

You can even buy a phone here for under $30 if you need to.

Cheers,
Andrew