State of Mobile Networks: Costa Rica (November 2017)

The 4G market in Costa Rica market is changing rapidly. In our last State of Mobile Networks: Costa Rica report, Movistar ran away with all six of OpenSignal's 3G and 4G awards, but six months later we see a different competitive environment. Kölbi has asserted itself with an extensive 4G expansion effort, boosting both its mobile data speeds and its LTE service reach. Movistar still held a slight edge in our awards, but Kölbi is definitely presenting a legitimate 4G challenge.

For this report, OpenSignal partnered with Costa Rican regulator Sutel to examine more than 117 million measurements collected from 9,581 consumer devices between Aug. 1 and Oct. 31 of 2017. We compared speeds, availability and latency on the 3G and 4G services of Costa Rica's three major operators: América Móvil's Claro, Grupo ICE's Kölbi and Telefónica's Movistar. Let's start first with LTE speed, a category where we have a new winner.

Kölbi took OpenSignal's 4G speed award with an average download of 10 Mbps, more than double the download speed we recorded on its networks in our June analysis. Kölbi has been busy over the last two quarters, building 452 new cell sites primarily in densely populated areas and high traffic zones like shopping centers. The results were abundantly clear in its 4G speed tests. Meanwhile, Claro debuted in our 4G metrics with an average download of 8 Mbps. The speed winner of our June report Movistar fell to last place in our rankings with a 4G speed of 5.2 Mbps.

In 3G speed, we recorded a statistical draw between Movistar and Claro, each averaging just over 2 Mbps. But Kölbi's 4G speed was able to overcome any 3G limitations, landing it our overall speed award.

Though Kölbi managed to push Costa Rica's average 4G speeds higher, Costa Rica's 4G networks are still slow when compared to those in other countries. In OpenSignal's recently published State of LTE report, Costa Rica ranked 76th out of 77 countries in 4G speed, and all three operators fell well below the global 4G download average of 16.6 Mbps.

In our 4G availability metric, Movistar maintained its considerable lead over its competitors. Our users were able to connect to Movistar's LTE network 72.3% of the time. Kölbi's LTE network expansion definitely led to some improvements in 4G availability — jumping from 56.5% to 60.8% between reports — but the increase wasn't enough to close the considerable gap with Movistar in our measurements. Both operators put Claro to shame, though. Our testers on Claro's network were only able to find a 4G signal 42.4% of the time.

Our final category, latency, measures a network's responsiveness. Low latency connections are ideal for supporting real-time communications apps like video chat. Movistar won our 4G latency category, but we recorded a three-way tie in 3G latency.

Costa Rica's mobile industry still has a long way to go before it can match the high-performance and far-reaching networks we see in much of the world, but we definitely see signs of steady improvement. In six months Kölbi more than doubled its 4G speed in our tests, and Movistar has already set a high bar for 4G availability. If Costa Rica's operators can continue to push their 4G limits, they'll quickly close the network gap.