State of Mobile Networks: Costa Rica (December 2018)

OpenSignal's past reports on Costa Rica haven't painted the rosiest picture of the Central American country's mobile broadband market. Historically our analysis has shown that 3G and 4G speeds in Costa Rica are slow and LTE's reach is limited in comparison to other Latin American countries. But we're starting to see some operators buck those trends. Kölbi's recent 4G network upgrades have caused its LTE download speeds to skyrocket in our measurements. Meanwhile Movistar continues to maintain its strong position in our 4G availability chart as the only operator to provide our users with a 4G signal more than 70% of the time.

For this report, OpenSignal has partnered with Costa Rican regulator Sutel to analyze more than 117 million measurements collected from 10,783 devices between Aug. 1 and Oct. 29, 2018. We compared the 3G and 4G results from Costa Rica's three principle mobile network operators América Móvil's Claro, Grupo ICE's Kölbi and Telefónica's Movistar to see how each fared.

For the second report in a row, Kölbi's 4G download speed increased sizably in our measurements. Our analysis shows Kölbi's average LTE connection of 20.6 Mbps was nearly 10 Mbps faster than either of its competitors' averages. Early this year, Kölbi began implementing LTE-Advanced upgrades and those efforts are definitely paying off. In the space of 12 months Kölbi's 4G download speeds have more than doubled in our measurements.

4G download wasn't the only area Kölbi excelled in. It won three of our four speed awards, and even managed to draw with Movistar in our 3G download category. In 4G upload speed, we saw a much closer contest than in download speed, with Kölbi leading Claro by little more than a megabit in our results. In our overall download speed category, however, Kölbi was again the clear-cut winner. Its download average of 12.5 Mbps was twice as fast as its nearest rival Movistar's average in our analysis.

In 4G availability, we didn't see much movement in our metrics, leaving Movistar the uncontested winner of the category. The Telefónica subsidiary provided an LTE signal to our users 70.4% of the time, and is still the only operator to have exceeded the 70% 4G availability mark in our measurements. Kölbi came in second with a 4G availability score of 63.2%, and it has shown incremental improvements over the past year, but Claro was a distant last in our results with a score of 46.3%. Operators with 4G availability results below 50% are typically in the early stages of their LTE rollouts, but Claro's 4G networks are hardly young. It first launched 4G services in 2014, and after more than four years we would expect its LTE reach to be higher.

In our final category of metrics, latency, Movistar and Kölbi split our two awards. Kölbi won our 4G latency category with an average network response time of 43.5 milliseconds, while Movistar won our 3G latency category with a response time of 72.6ms.

For the time being at least, Kölbi and Movistar look secure in their leads in our respective 4G download speed and 4G availability metrics. But there are signs of LTE improvements on the horizon, especially in speed. Claro completed LTE-Advanced upgrades in 20 cities in June, while Movistar announced similar 4G network enhancements in September. As those improvements spread across the country in 2019, we could very well see Movistar and Claro start closing the now considerable gaps between themselves and Kölbi in 4G speed.