Mobile Networks Update: Costa Rica (June 2018)

In our most recent State of Mobile Networks: Costa Rica report six months ago, we found competition flourishing as 3G and 4G speeds increased, and we're happy to report that trend continues. Opensignal has partnered with Costa Rican regulator Sutel on this report to analyze more than 133 million measurements collected from 9,358 consumer devices between Feb. 1 and May 1, 2018. We compared the speeds, availability and latency we measured on the 3G and 4G networks of Costa Rica's three major operators: América Móvil's Claro, Grupo ICE's Kölbi and Telefónica's Movistar. (Click here for a Spanish language version of this report.)

  • Kölbi has swept the board in our download speed awards, taking the 4G, 3G and overall speed prizes. In our 4G download speed category, all three operators made gains, but Kölbi showed the most impressive increase of nearly 6 Mbps to achieve an average speed of 16 Mbps. The operator has pulled ahead of rivals Claro and Movistar, with measured speeds of 11 Mbps and 7 Mbps respectively. This pattern was repeated in our 3G speed metric, where Kölbi's score increased by over 1 Mbps to reach 2.6 Mbps, seeing it leap into the top spot. These impressive speed increases meant Kölbi easily won our overall speed category, where its score of 9.3 Mbps was more than double that of either of its rivals. Kölbi has been busy upgrading its 4G network to LTE-Advanced, and it appears the investment is paying off as it streaks ahead in our speed metrics.
  • Unfortunately, the impressive increases we saw in speed were not reflected in our 4G availability category. Movistar kept its place at the top of our list, but its score was fairly stagnant at 69%, while Kölbi's score was also static on 61%. Claro saw the only noticeable increase in our availability metric, from 42% to 46%, but the América Móvil operator remains some distance behind its peers.
  • Kölbi and Movistar drew in our 4G latency category, as both were neck-and-neck with a response time of 43 milliseconds. However, neither operator saw much improvement in this metric over the last six months, while Claro managed to improve its response time by 22ms to reach 55ms in our measurements. Movistar maintained its lead in our 3G latency category, but all three operators saw significant improvement in this metric, boosting their scores by at least 27ms each.

Opensignal Awards Table

Download Speed: 4G Download Speed: 3G Download Speed: Overall Upload Speed: 4G Latency: 4G Latency: 3G Availability: 4G

Claro

medal

Kölbi

medal medal medal medal medal

Movistar

medal medal medal

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Performance by Metric

Download Speed: 4G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Download Speed: 3G

This metric shows the average download speed for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Download Speed: Overall

This metric shows the average download speed experienced by Opensignal users across all of an operator's 3G and 4G networks. Overall speed doesn't just factor in 3G and LTE speeds, but also the availability of each network technology. Operators with lower LTE availability tend to have lower overall speeds because their customers spend more time connected to slower 3G networks.

Upload Speed: 4G

This metric shows the average upload speed for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users.

Latency: 4G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on LTE connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Latency: 3G

This metric shows the average latency for each operator on 3G connections as measured by Opensignal users. Latency, measured in milliseconds, is the delay data experiences as it makes a round trip through the network. A lower score in this metric is a sign of a more responsive network.

Availability: 4G

This metric shows the proportion of time Opensignal users have an LTE connection available to them on each operator’s network. It's a measure of how often users can access a 4G network rather than a measure of geographic or population coverage.

Our Methodology

Opensignal measures the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks as they go about their daily lives. We collect 3 billion individual measurements every day from tens of millions of smartphones worldwide.

Our measurements are collected at all hours of the day, every day of the year, under conditions of normal usage, including inside buildings and outdoors, in cities and the countryside, and everywhere in between. By analyzing on-device measurements recorded in the places where subscribers actually live, work and travel, we report on mobile network service the way users truly experience it.

For this particular report, 133,055,292 datapoints were collected from 9,358 users during the period: 2018-02-01 - 2018-05-01.

We continually adapt our methodology to best represent the changing experience of consumers on mobile networks and, therefore, comparisons of the results to past reports should be considered indicative only. For more information on how we collect and analyze our data, see our methodology page.

For every metric we've calculated statistical confidence intervals and plotted them on all of the graphs. When confidence intervals overlap for a certain metric, our measured results are too close to declare a winner in a particular category. In those cases, we show a statistical draw. For this reason, some metrics have multiple operator winners.

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