Self-Employed in the DR

antonius · #1 11-28-2006, 12:10 AM

I am planning to work remotely from the DR so I can be with my wife, our baby girl and two stepchildren while she awaits her visa interview (possibly 8-12 more months to go). My job will not involve selling anything or hiring employees only doing the work I normally do from the office at my computer from a home in the DR. I would like to make everything as simple as possible.

The complicating factor is that my company will require I establish a foreign entity for their liability and tax purposes so they can retain my services as an independent contractor. I was thinking that it might be best to have this done under my wife's name so that I do not have to establish residency in the DR. Can anyone offer any assistance on the best approach to my situation and where I can find legal assistance in the DR to make this happen? I will need an English speaking lawyer that is preferably based in La Vega though Puerto Plata is probably a more realistic option.

What are the taxes like compared to the US assuming I generate $80-100K in revenue/income?

Also, if anyone has any experience with the reliability of satellite internet connection to convey using Unasat system. I am required to have a reliable internet as a condition for being allowed to work remotely.

RSMMAN · #2 11-28-2006, 12:41 AM

MY I ASK WHAT TYPE OF WORK YOU ARE DOING

Chris · #3 11-28-2006, 06:47 AM

antonius, it is not worth while going through the DR legal procedure for company establishment if you're simply a one-man show doing contracting for a period of time. I would suggest do yourself a quick s-corp for about 80 bucks in the US. Your company can pay you into this s-corp. Taxation is fine, as any income that you earn while residing outside the US, up to a ceiling of 80,000 (check this number, it may have changed), is tax free. Check this with a US attorney and tax man.

Yes, Unasat is mostly reliable, as reliable as systems get these days. We are still getting drop-outs in the DR with Unasat systems (Only in the DR surprisingly). If you do a lot of voip, consider a different system, if not, the Unasat is fine. Do not use Vonage or Skype or Net2Phone over Unasat at all. They have their own proprietary voip offering and that is reliable. Make sure you have a 4 watt BUC on your system, at least a 1,2 meter dish and install it correctly, and to spec.

antonius · #4 12-03-2006, 12:31 AM

Thank you for the info Chris. Regarding the drop-outs on the satellite internet connections, do they tend to be intermittent and of short duration or for longer periods of time? The reason I ask is that I will have a VPN connection and it drops after about 10 seconds of inactivity. If I am being dropped consistently it could present a problem for me in trying to complete my work.

Chris · #5 12-03-2006, 04:12 AM

If you do anything else but simple surfing and e-mail, Unasat at this moment is not a good bet. We're having specific problems with dropouts of varying duration in two areas of the world. The one is the DR, and the other is the mid-West Conus.

I stress that this is 'at the moment' and for the last three months. It seems to be a sticky problem and hard to resolve. The problem resides at the Network Operating System Gateway, and not in the locally installed equipment. Unasat is currently moving our customers to a different inroute to continue to try to resolve the problem and is working closely with us. Unasat support currently is doing performance tuning on all of our Unasat customers individually, to minimize the impact of the dropouts. Nevertheless, our mission critical customers do not find the performance satisfactory, and for ourselves, the performance is not what it should be.

This problem could be resolved any day, or it could still drag on a little. It has already dragged on a little and we have some unhappy customers out there, because of this technical problem.

I stress that this is area specific, but until it is resolved, we are not installing much Unasat in the DR. At this point, we rather work with iDirect, which is a more expensive system, but rock solid with guaranteed very low (1-15) contention ratios.

So, if you want to install a system very quickly, I would not go Unasat immediately (I stress this is for the DR, as other customers on other islands in the Caribbean are not affected by this problem).

Keep in touch as to timing of your installation. Again, this could be resolved any time and other customers in other areas are very content with their Unasat systems, the quality of the voip and whatever they decided to do with the systems. In terms of price/performance, the Unasat is still hard to beat and so far I have to give them credit .. they are hanging in there and working to fix this. The technology is good, but I must admit, this teething problem is a pain in the patoot for everyone involved.

Chris · #6 12-12-2006, 10:14 AM

The initial serious teething problems we had with Unasat in the DR is over and done with. We are on our own shared transponder (big stuff this!) and our customers on Unasat are reporting good service. Unasat still remains one of the best medium cost solutions out there. I cannot tell you that we did not have serious problems with the initial installations, but I can tell you that the problems have been solved.

Unasat has a proprietary VOIP solution. As this is perfectly tuned for their own system, it works very well in terms of voice quality and response times.

DunHill · #7 12-12-2006, 11:23 AM

Just a view of our use of the unasat system

WiFi network in and around Juan Dolio (35 hotspots), with about 15-25 users online
Several WiFi users with net2phone, skype etc etc
and our own hardware PAP2 voip
If nobody is doing big/heavy downloads it works all smoothly on a 1500/256 UnaSat connection
During "primetime" hickups are normal, it is like the trafficjamin the morning and evening, outside those hours the systems works better than we ever expected

Arjan