Costa Rica

Kölbi remains the leader in Costa Rica when it comes to Video Experience. The operator won our Video Experience award with a score of 65 points (on a scale of 0-100) — an improvement of 3.1 points since the last report, which tipped Kölbi over the Very Good rating threshold. This means that our users on Kölbi’s network generally enjoyed faster loading times with only occasional stalling while streaming video on their smartphones.

Claro and Movistar have also progressed since our last report, with their scores rising by 5.2 and 4.2 points, respectively. However, they missed upgrading their rating from Fair to Good by less than a point with scores of 54.3 and 54.9, respectively. That said, when we look at our users’ experience in 4G networks only, both the operators garnered a Good rating, while Kölbi remarkably achieved our highest rating of Excellent. An Excellent Video Experience is a big achievement indeed, meaning fast load times and practically non-existent stalling at all resolutions.

In this report, we took our first look at the Games Experience in Costa Rica at the operator level and we learned that playing multiplayer games in Costa Rica is challenging. Claro won our Games Experience award with a score of 50.7 on a scale of 0-100, followed by Kölbi whose score was 9.6 points behind Claro’s. While both operators’ scores placed them in the Poor category, meaning there is plenty of room for improvement, Movistar ended up in the Very Poor category with a score of 38.6.

Games Experience is a measure of the experience of real-time multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network. It represents the experience of popular genres of mobile games such as battle royale games like Fortnite or MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) titles like Arena of Valor. A number of factors combine to determine the eventual score including jitter, packet loss and latency. A high score improves the feel of gameplay and means that a game’s artificial intelligence is less likely to smooth over issues with network communications that could otherwise interrupt play.

Claro and Kölbi were battling it out for Opensignal's Voice App Experience award in our last report, but in this data collection period an outright leader has emerged. Claro won our Voice App Experience award with a score of 77.8 in our 100-point scale, putting it 2.8 points ahead of Kölbi. While both the operators achieved an Acceptable rating, Movistar remained in the Poor category with a score of 72.7.

An Acceptable rating means users were satisfied with the quality of the call and were generally able to comprehend without repetition, while some may have suffered from perceptible call quality impairments such as clicking sounds or distortion. Likewise, a Poor rating means that many of our users' calls were marred by frequent distortion, clicking sounds or silence.

Opensignal’s Voice App Experience measures the quality of experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services — mobile voice apps such as WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook Messenger, etc. The measure uses a model derived from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality and a series of calibrated technical parameters. This model characterizes the exact relationship between the technical measurements and perceived call quality.

Kölbi remains the unchallenged winner of our Download Speed Experience award. Our users in Costa Rica, on average, enjoyed the fastest download speeds of 18.8 Mbps on Kölbi’s network — almost 90% faster than speeds experienced by their Claro counterparts (9.9 Mbps) and more than twice as fast as their Movistar counterparts (8.3 Mbps).

When we look at download speeds by technology, on 4G Download Speed Experience Kölbi has burst through the 25 Mbps milestone with a score of 26.3 Mbps, while its peers are way below the 15 Mbps mark. On 3G Download Speed Experience, all three operators were toe-to-toe with scores that are no more than 0.3 Mbps apart.

Kölbi held on to our Upload Speed Experience award with our users on its network experiencing average speeds of 6.6 Mbps. While Claro came close to challenge the leader with a score of 6.1 Mbps, Movistar was further behind with 4.8 Mbps.

The national results were also reflected in our 4G Upload Speed sub-metric — unlike in the 3G Upload Speed category, where Claro was marginally ahead of Kölbi, while Movistar remained last-paced.

Upload speeds are becoming increasingly important in mobile services, as social media, social sharing and video chat apps become more widely used. Mobile users are moving away from content consumption to content creation, which gives operators with the fastest upload speeds a distinct advantage.

Kölbi also won on Latency Experience. Our users on Kölbi’s network clocked overall network response time of 49 milliseconds — at least 2.5 ms faster than their Movistar counterparts. Claro users experienced much higher latency of 73.8 ms.

4G access in Costa Rica is growing incrementally. Once again Movistar won our award, with an improvement of 5.4 percentage points since the last report, bringing its score (79.2) close to the 80% mark. However, the largest improvement of 11 percentage points was seen by our users on Claro’s network. The operator has now pushed past the 75% milestone with a score of 76.4%, making notable strides to whittle away Movistar’s sizable lead. Our users on Kölbi also saw an improvement of 3.8 percentage points, to bring up the rear with 73.7%.

Our 4G Availability metric shows the proportion of time 4G users spent connected to their 4G network. With all three operators’ scoring above 70%, our users in Costa Rica, on average, now connect to 4G services more than 70% of the time regardless of their choice of network.

Kölbi also won our inaugural 4G Coverage Experience award in Costa Rica, with a score of 7.2 points (on a scale of 0-10). Movistar finished second with 6.6 points, while Claro was further behind with 5.3 points.

Opensignal’s 4G Coverage Experience metric is a measure of how our mobile subscribers experience 4G coverage on an operator’s network. Measured on a scale of 0-10, it analyzes the locations where customers of a network operator received a 4G signal relative to the locations visited by Opensignal users across all network operators.