Practical advice:
You may fly into Guayaquil. Bring the best quad-band mobile you can, especially if you are arriving from europe. if you are travelling from north america, dual-band phones that work in north america will work here. Although better modern phones support all four bands used world-wide. Check. Phones cannot be mailed with an Ecuadorian destination. [At all, for the last year and a half, since approximately 2012/6]. So you must bring in the phone you plan to use. I suggest for a durability profile, but not for speed, the NEC Terrain, the Casio GZone, the Catepiller series, or a case for your phone to keep out dust and water. [See the note on speed below] Bring a second, ‘used’ phone (at minimum). Customs apparently doesn’t check often for this, how many phones you have, and the written legislation is one new, one used. You might be able to get away with more. At minimum, a second phone can be sold to someone who needs it here. Gringos are in a bad way, since the selection of phones is very limited, and the only straightforward way to bring in a phone directly is as a dealer, and no one does that who is looking for a phone for themselves. Phones which cost 150 on north america cost 225 here at minimum. There can be as much as a 180% increase in the retail price; IF you can find that model here.

Ecuadorians are a phone-poor people. I’m sure the mail-blockade does not help. This is why your phone will not be returned to you if you abandon it. They simply don’t have any themselves. It is a completely stupid policy, yes, which increases gringo dissatisfaction with the area.

Claro:
If you already have a dual-SIM phone, add a Claro sim. If you have a single-sim phone, consider buying an inexpensive local phone to put your old SIM in, just in case someone needs to text you (however see the notes to follow). [These unlocked phones cost about $45, and are manufactured in Ecuador.] Just look around for any Claro shop; the cards with three dollars of credit are five dollars. Put an additional 20 dollars on the card; claro to claro or to call any other mobile locally, is 20 cents a minute! There are ways around these high prices and I will explain them.

One reason you bring a smart phone (android, or ewww iphone), is they have Whatsapp, and (the less popular) VIber. You can text and send voice messages back and forth, and share your location which is made accurate by the GPS in your phone. You can send photos. And best of all it is over the data plan of the phone; it does not count against talk time or SMS messages. As soon as getting your Claro SIM in your Smartphone, go to a large Claro corporate shop, and activate the internet service for the phone! Until you do, you cannot buy a pre-paid data package for the phone, although the menu item exists when you dial *123#, it is blocked for some reason on the SIM until Claro customer service unblocks it once.  As an alternate, a smaller Claro shop clerk can use your phone to call the (free) customer service number, and have them do it remotely.

The instructions for ordering the prepaid data package start with *123#, call. You will get a menu. You want to choose Internet Movil and navigate through until you get to choose a data package. The options are 100MB and 300MB for what most gringos will get. The 100MB package is 4 dollar, and should last a *light* user all month. If you are new here, better to get the 300MB package for 10.99 plus tax, about 12.60 dollars.

Activate your Whatsapp, if you are not using it already, before leaving your former destination, and when you change SIMs, the old Whatsapp number will function (at least on android). You will not have to re-do Whatsapp with the new number, which can help to ease the transition of travel. It does not cost any more, and it’s like continuing to have your north american (or european) phone, while here.

Speed:
Your phone should be fast. Like Samsung Galaxy S 4 fast. The reason why, and test this ahead of time, is use Google Translate on you phone (iphone users forget you). Hunt around the settins. Notice you can change the Spanish dialect to Ecuador. Do that. You can also download the Spanish language pack that Google Translate uses to translate. This is a great idea. However, I have noticed on slower phones, they are sending some data to google and google seems to be doing some of the processing. So for instance on an Edge (not 3G) network connection, a slower older phone seems to perform better through it’s data connection, instead of using the local language packs. What it boils down to is, when you are having a back and forth conversation, it’s best to have an S4 type phone in terms of speed, to do the translations near-real-time.