Costa Rica

[Rawvega]

I've spent the past 8 days in Costa Rica and have found the service pretty decent. My experience was limited to Liberia and the Guanacaste province so I can't speak to the rest of the country. My phone was on kölbi & Movistar for about equal amounts of time. It also parked on Claro, but for a much lesser amount of time than the other two. Being able to access all three networks meant that coverage was excellent. I don't recall a time that I saw 'No Service', but to be fair I never went all that deep into any rain forests. If memory serves, I was accessing B7 LTE with kölbi, B3 LTE with Movistar and W-CDMA with Claro. Speeds were typical of Sprint's free slow data 0.02-0.03 Mbps and pings a little above 350 Ms.

[ingenium]

I've spent the past 8 days in Costa Rica and have found the service pretty decent. My experience was limited to Liberia and the Guanacaste province so I can't speak to the rest of the country. My phone was on kölbi & Movistar for about equal amounts of time. It also parked on Claro, but for a much lesser amount of time than the other two. Being able to access all three networks meant that coverage was excellent. I don't recall a time that I saw 'No Service', but to be fair I never went all that deep into any rain forests. If memory serves, I was accessing B7 LTE with kölbi, B3 LTE with Movistar and W-CDMA with Claro. Speeds were typical of Sprint's free slow data 0.02-0.03 Mbps and pings a little above 350 Ms.

Kölbi I believe has the best coverage, and should work pretty much everywhere. But they're also the most congested. They are the state owned provider. Movistar is pretty good, with very good coverage and good speeds. I've used prepaid SIMs on both when there for several weeks, along with Sprint roaming (open world, so no speed throttling). When I was there in January, I found their coverage to generally be the same now, whereas 5-6 years ago (pre LTE) Kölbi was king. The only differences are in very rural, mountainous areas, where you might have no service on one but BARELY have service on another (enough to send a text for example, but not much else).

It's interesting that your phone dynamically switched between them. I was able to force mine to use any provider with my Sprint SIM, but when left on automatic it always preferred Movistar. Even after locking it to a provider, it would eventually go back to automatic on its own and switch to Movistar. Movistar is generally Sprint's preferred roaming partner in any country where they have service. Sometimes that's great, and sometimes it's awful haha.

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[Rawvega]

21 hours ago, ingenium said:

It's interesting that your phone dynamically switched between them. I was able to force mine to use any provider with my Sprint SIM, but when left on automatic it always preferred Movistar. Even after locking it to a provider, it would eventually go back to automatic on its own and switch to Movistar. Movistar is generally Sprint's preferred roaming partner in any country where they have service. Sometimes that's great, and sometimes it's awful haha.

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I thought that it was pretty interesting too. But using Signal Check Pro every so often if I wasn't actively doing anything, I would check to see which carrier and frequency band I was using and often it would be different. I have nary a clue as to the rhyme or reason why it was switching between all three carriers on the fly.