State of Mobile Networks: Costa Rica (June 2017)

From February 1 to April 30, OpenSignal captured 56.2 million measurements from 2,722 smartphones equipped with our app on Costa Rica’s three major networks: América Móvil’s Claro, Grupo ICE's Kölbi and Telefónica's Movistar. This data forms the basis of our latest State of Mobile Networks report for Costa Rica.

Focusing on 4G services, OpenSignal’s availability, latency and speed awards once again go to Movistar, whose 73.3% 4G service availability has remained relatively the same since we published our last Costa Rica report in November. Movistar is still well in the lead, 16 percentage points in front of its nearest rival in our measurements. Our users on Kölbi, on the other hand, are now benefitting from LTE signals on their devices 56.5% of the time, which is a full 12 percentage points above its previous results. Movistar’s already impressive 4G availability and Kölbi’s quick improvement should bode well for a competitive 4G future in the country. Unfortunately, limited 4G data was available from Claro-connected devices, so the operator has been excluded from this category.

Costa Rica still in the 4G slow lane

When it comes to 4G download speeds, Movistar was a full megabit-per-second ahead of its nearest 4G rival Kölbi, delivering an average download of 5.8 Mbps in our measurements. These speeds should be seen in the global context where average LTE download speeds are 16.2 Mbps, according to our recently published State of LTE report. In our analysis of 75 countries, Costa Rica as a whole came in dead last in average 4G speeds. There is clearly room for improvement. That said Costa Rica’s spectrum situation, which has been a restricting factor, is set to change with the country’s upcoming 1800MHz/1900MHz/2100MHz spectrum auction.

Our latest report also looked at 3G download speeds, with all three operators, Movistar, Claro and Kölbi, still offering relatively slow speeds. We measured average 3G speeds for all three below 2.5 Mbps, which is well below the global average of 4.4 Mbps, as indicated in our State of LTE report.

Our results this time round also assessed overall average download speeds, which measure the typical speed experienced by users across both the 3G and 4G networks of each operator. At 4.6 Mbps Movistar was the fastest operator in our measurements with speeds nearly double that of Kölbi’s 2.7 Mbps, and more than double that of Claro’s 1.8 Mbps. Not only does Movistar have the fastest LTE speeds in our measurements, but its customers have access to those fast 4G connections more often. Where subscribers are still having to rely more frequently on 3G service availability because of lack of 4G signals, then the overall download speeds reflect this.

Our final metric, latency, is a measure of a network’s reaction time, and it can have a big impact on customer experience. Lower latency connections mean web pages and videos begin loading faster and users experience less lag time in real-time communications apps. Movistar, once again, won our awards in this category for both 3G and 4G service delivery, with its users experiencing the shortest lag times in our tests. Behind Movistar in the 3G latency stakes, Claro and Kölbi were neck and neck in the category.

Brighter 4G future on the horizon

Winning all our awards for availability, speed and latency, Movistar offers the fastest and most consistent – though, like its rivals, somewhat slow – 3G and 4G experience in our test results. While all three Costa Rican operators’ mobile performance has remained relatively consistent over the past six months, our data shows Movistar is besting its rivals by a considerable margin.

That said, the mobile landscape in Costa Rica is set to change as new spectrum is released in Sutel’s forthcoming auctions. This OpenSignal report coincides with the news, earlier in June, that the regulator, Sutel, has now cleared both Movistar and Claro to bid for spectrum in the 1800MHz, 1900MHz and 2100MHz bands. With more spectrum, operators will be able to add more 4G capacity, delivering faster speeds and improved customer experience.