Costa Rica

Kölbi continues to lead on Video Experience in Costa Rica. The operator won our Video Experience award with a score of 62.6 points (on a scale of 0-100) — a decline of 2.4 points since our last report, which placed Kölbi in the Good category. Our users on Movistar also reported a drop of 1.1 points, while their Claro counterparts saw a diminutive improvement of 0.1 points. As a result, both operators remain in the Fair category. Looking solely at 4G Video Experience, Claro and Movistar maintained a Good rating with our users on their networks reporting an increase of less than a point. Simultaneously, Kölbi ended up in the Very Good category with a decline of 1.4 points.

Opensignal’s Video Experience metric quantifies video streaming quality by measuring real-world video streams across a range of content delivery networks, using dedicated video streaming tests to reflect the true experience of users over an operator’s mobile network. The metric calculation takes picture quality, video loading time and stall rate into account. A Good rating indicates that our users enjoyed an acceptable experience when streaming mobile video at lower resolutions, but loading times could still be slow and stalling was not uncommon, especially at higher resolutions. And as we descend to the Fair rating, loading times get longer and users will encounter more stops and stutters in video streams, most notably at higher resolutions.

Playing multiplayer mobile games in Costa Rica continues to remain challenging for our users on all three networks. Claro held on to our Opensignal Games Experience award with a score of 55.1 out of a possible 100. The mobile Games Experience of our Movistar and Kölbi users continued to lag Claro, similarly to our last report.

Games Experience quantifies 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. Several factors combine to determine the eventual score, including jitter, packet loss and latency. A high score indicates better 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 held on to our Voice App Experience award and maintained an Acceptable rating with a score of 78.4 points. While our Claro users reported a tiny improvement of less than a point, compared to our last report, those on Kölbi and Movistar users observed a decline of 3.2 and 1.9 points, respectively. With a score of 71.8 points, Kölbi joined Movistar (70.8) in the Poor category.

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 many users were dissatisfied and likely suffered from increased call quality impairments.

Our Voice App Experience metric quantifies the quality of consumers’ experience for over-the-top (OTT) voice services using apps like WhatsApp, Skype and Facebook Messenger over mobile networks. It ranks operators on a scale of 0-100 using a mean opinion score (MOS) model derived from an International Telecommunication Union (ITU) based approach for quantifying overall voice call quality.

Our users have once again observed the highest average download speeds on Kölbi’s network, with the operator racking up an impressive Download Speed Experience score of 22 Mbps, up by 3.2 Mbps from our previous report. With this boost, Kölbi’s lead has widened from 8.9 Mbps to 10.3 Mbps over second-placed Claro (11.7 Mbps). This means that our Kölbi users enjoy 87.7% faster speed than their peers on Claro’s network who reported a gain of 1.8 Mbps. In contrast, Movistar users saw a slight decline with download speeds averaging 8 Mbps.

Breaking down the download speeds by technology: on 4G Download Speed Experience, Kölbi has burst through the 30 Mbps milestone with an impressive score of 33 Mbps — almost 110% faster than Claro’s score of 15.7 Mbps and 3.2 times faster than Movistar’s score of 10.3 Mbps. On 3G Download Speed Experience, all three operators were on a par with 0.7 Mbps or less separating their scores.

The outright win that Kölbi achieved in our previous report for Upload Speed Experience has been replaced with a statistical tie between it and Claro. This change is due to a 0.3 Mbps (4.4%) rise in Claro’s score and a 0.4 Mbps (6.2%) drop in Kölbi’s, since our last report six months ago. Simultaneously, our Movistar users observed a marginal decrease of 0.1Mbps to 4.6 Mbps.

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.

Our Latency Experience award is the only national award to have been won by Movistar outright in this report. Its score of 51.5 milliseconds indicated less delay and a more responsive experience than Kölbi's score of 54.7ms and Claro's score of 67.1ms. Movistar’s victory over the previous winner, Kölbi, was due to an increased delay of 5.7 ms reported by our Kölbi users and 0.1 ms improvement reported by their counterparts on Movistar’s network, on average. That said, our users on Claro’s network clocked the largest delay reduction of 6.7ms. Latency measures the delay users experience as data makes a round trip through the network, meaning the lower the latency score, the better and the more responsive the experience.

Claro and Movistar became the joint winners of our 4G Availability award. Since the last report, our Claro users observed a modest increase of 1.7 percentage points. In contrast, our Movistar and Kölbi users have seen a decline of 1.7 and 6.9 percentage points, respectively, since our last report. As a result of these changes, Claro and Movistar statistically tied for first place, while Kölbi finished last.

4G Availability shows the proportion of time 4G users spent connected to their 4G network. And since our other metrics are affected by whether the user is connected to 4G, a higher 4G Availability can help improve overall scores and vice versa.

Kölbi won our 4G Coverage Experience award in Costa Rica, with a score of 7.4 points (on a scale of 0-10). Movistar finished second with 6.9 points, while Claro was further behind with 5.6 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.