The iPhone 4S craze among Tico lovers of Apple’s most iconic device has unleashed a price war among the three major wireless carriers in Costa Rica. It is clear that former communications monopoly ICE is leading the battle, although the first salvo was quietly launched by Claro about a week ago. What is clear about the war is that smartphone consumers are bearing the brunt of the hostilities.

It all started when Claro surreptitiously raised the price of the iPhone 4S. The news were broken by iPhoneti.co, a blog proudly hosted by Ticoblogger, on March 20^th. No one knows for sure when Claro decided to step it up in terms of pricing, but the end result is jaw dropping: an iPhone 4S with 16 Gb of memory went from 90,000 colones on a 16,500 colones monthly plan to 185,500 colones.

Movistar was the next combatant to launch an offensive. Unlike Claro’s cloak-and-dagger approach, Movistar has been loud and aggressive in its offering to Tico iPhone 4S owners: bring me your handset and you will a 35 percent discount on your monthly plan. Movistar is clearly trying to recruit more troops in the iPhone 4S war, enticing them to switch over to their subscription plans. The way iPhoneti.co sees it, this 35 percent discount could realize savings of about 249,000 colones over the life of the two-year contract on a 400 minutes and 2 Mbps montly data plan.

The Spain-based company then borrowed a page from Claro’s strategy and stealthily raised its best-selling iPhone 4S 16 Gb to 135,000 colones from 60,000. This was clearly in response to what the ICE-Kolbi and Claro did with their own iPhone 4S offerings, although at least Kolbi announced well in advance that its reduced prices were part of a special introductory offer only. Kolbi continues to enjoy a greater share of the iPhone market in Costa Rica.

So now the three major wireless carrier belligerents offer similar iPhone 4S prices, although Claro and Movistar both offer higher connection speeds in terms of wireless broadband -at least on paper. A test of wireless Internet connections speeds performed by The Costa Rica Star on a prepaid Claro SIM chip indicated that the real speed was lower than advertised, although extremely cheap nonetheless.