State of Mobile Networks: Costa Rica (November 2016)

Costa Rica's 3G services are impressive, but it still has some catching up to do in 4G — especially when it comes to speed. OpenSignal is partnering with telecom regulator Sutel to produce a State of Mobile Networks Report for Costa Rica. Drawing on 32.7 million measurements collected by 2,688 OpenSignal smartphone users between Aug. 1 and October 31, we examined the 3G and 4G performance of this Central American country's three major mobile operators: América Móvil's Claro, Grupo ICE's Kölbi and Telefónica's Movistar.

We found all three operators provided excellent access to 3G connections, with one operator, Movistar, performing quite impressively in 4G availability as well. Our testers were able to find a 3G or better signal on Claro, Kölbi and Movistar more than 87.9% of the time. In Movistar's case 3G/4G availability was as high as 97.3% in our tests, meaning there was practically no instance where our testers couldn't find a data signal on the operator's network.

When we looked at 4G only, the results were more mixed. We were able to detect an LTE signal on Movistar 76.9% of the time, but for Kölbi, we only found LTE connections 43.7% of the time. For Claro we collected very limited number of tests on its 4G network, perhaps reflecting its earlier stage of LTE rollout compared to the other operators. Due to that limited data, we've excluded Claro from our 4G metrics.

In terms of speed, however, all three operators came up lacking. While we see LTE download speeds in many areas of the world pushing beyond 30 Mbps, the highest average 4G connection we measured in Costa Rica was 6.1 Mbps, again on Movistar's network. Costa Rican operators have been hampered by the limited amount of spectrum they have to devote to 4G services. That said, we found 3G services to be on the sluggish side in Costa Rica as well, with all three operators testing below the 3.2 Mbps global average we measured in our last State of LTE report. When we factored in both 3G and 4G speeds as well as 4G availability, we found overall speeds — representing the average connection across all an operator's networks — in the 1.9 Mbps to 4.1 Mbps range (we only included 3G speed in our overall speed calculations for Claro).

The final metric we examined was latency, which is a measure of a network's reaction time. The lower the latency of a connection the faster web pages will begin rendering and the less lag time users experience in real-time communications apps like video calling. Movistar won both our 3G and 4G latency awards.

In conclusion, Costa Rica is quite the interesting case when it comes to providing mobile data services. The country's operators have built out an expansive 3G infrastructure — reflected in its high overall availability scores — but we don't see that same level of development in 4G, especially when it comes to deploying LTE capacity. The good news is that a spectrum auction is on the horizon. As operators begin plowing more spectrum into their 4G networks, speeds should increase considerably.