State of Mobile Networks: Costa Rica (August 2016)

It's certainly not difficult to find a mobile data connection in Costa Rica, but finding a fast mobile data connection is a different story. OpenSignal has partnered with telecom regulator Sutel for its first State of Mobile Networks report for Costa Rica, and what we found is a country that has highly available 3G services, but still lacks the capacity to deliver fast mobile broadband connections.

For this report we drew upon 19.7 million measurements from 1,836 OpenSignal smartphone users in Costa Rica between May 1 and July 31. We examined 3G performance and (where available) 4G performance on the networks of all three major operators: América Móvil's Claro, Grupo ICE's Kölbi and Telefónica's Movistar. First, let's take a look at the accessibility of mobile data services in Costa Rica.

Rather than measure geographic coverage, OpenSignal's availability metric tracks the proportion of time users can find a signal on a particular network. Looking first at 4G, our testers were able to connect to Movistar's LTE network 63.2% of the time and to Kölbi's LTE network 44.4% of the time. Though Claro launched its first 4G service in 2014, the number of tests we have on its LTE network is still very limited, so we've excluded the operator from our 4G metrics.

When we expanded our analysis to include 3G, we found a much more pervasive mobile data infrastructure. Movistar was again the leader, delivering a 3G or better signal 96.2% of the time in our tests. Both Claro and Kölbi had impressive performances in this category as well, each with overall mobile data availability scores of 88.6%. In fact, in our most recent Global State of Mobile Networks report, Costa Rica fell among an elite group of countries able to deliver a 3G or better signal more than 90% of the time.

While Costa Rican operators stood out in network availability, we can't say the same about network speed. The fastest 4G download speeds we measured, 7.1 Mbps, were on Movistar's LTE network. To put that in perspective the global average for LTE connections is 17.4 Mbps, and in our most recent State of LTE report Costa Rica was the slowest of the 78 countries we examined in 4G speeds. The 3G speeds we measured on all three operators were also relatively low. Those slow 3G and 4G speeds, combined with Costa Rica's still limited access to 4G, meant overall mobile data speeds were also quite low, ranging from 1.8 Mbps to 3.2 Mbps (we only used 3G data in our calculations for Claro's overall speed).

The final metric we examined was latency, which is essentially the reaction time of a network. A lower latency connection leads to better mobile data performance in many applications such as real-time communications apps and web browsing. In both 3G and 4G latency we recorded statistical draws between Movistar and Kölbi.

While Costa Rica has laid a great foundation for mobile data services, it's still suffering from a lack of capacity, which ultimately determines the speeds Costa Rican consumers have access to. Operators have an opportunity to boost their 4G capacity in the coming year, though. Sutel has announced plans to auction off spectrum in two frequency bands in the first half of 2017. Those airwaves could be used to boost LTE speeds significantly.