A Faster World on the Horizon for Costa Rica

Faster Telecom Services a likely reality in Costa Rica
Better Internet Connections a Likely Reality in Costa Rica.

Costa Rica has always lagged behind the major technological heavyweight countries of the modern world such as the United States, Japan and the majority of Europe, but recently, it has taken major steps to minimize the gap and become a more technology savvy nation.

One of the reasons that Costa Rica has been trailing their overseas counterparts is the fact that the telecommunications market has been dominated by a state run monopoly, the Costa Rica Electricity Institute (ICE). With no competition, ICE set up its own rules for the market. Clients experienced frequent complications such as waiting days or sometimes weeks to have their internet connection set up, random internet blackouts, unhelpful servicemen and more. It was disappointing, you either had to put up with a varying form of internet service, or go with out – simple as that.

But times are changing, mainly in due course with Central American Free Trade Agreement. In short, the free trade deal will bring business connections in Costa Rica and the United States closer together as import and export tariffs will be eliminated. As part of the deal, the telecommunications market in Costa Rica will be opened for the first time for foreign competitors to delve into.

This has clearly shaken ICE, which realizes that within the next 6 months they could be competing with companies that provide a better service than they do. But ICE has an advantage, it already has a large customer base and seems determined to take advantage of it for the small amount of time that they have left operating in a market that is under their control.

Early indications show that ICE will start to cater to the publics’ demand of broadband Internet. With currently approximately 75,000 homes/businesses still on dial up connections and only 50,000 on broadband, they hope to double the amount of people who are connected to broadband by the time the year is out. They also hope to keep the dial up connections at a similar level (68,000) as they look to offer dial-up in areas of Costa Rica that are currently ‘offline’.

One of the ways that ICE intends to make this change in increasing the amount of people who are online is by connecting to the massive underwater data cable that currently runs from Los Angeles down to Panama. This will help increase speed, reliability and availability of the internet in Costa Rica to connect to the rest of the world. A project that will reportedly cost $35 million.

ICE has started to improve the internet in Costa Rica already, but their prior poor reputation does inevitably leave the door open to wider competition once access is granted. Major Central American Internet corporations will be eager to capitalize on a market that they will find easy to relate to; similar cultures, faiths, languages and way of life.

That’s not to say that the American bigwigs won’t take an interest too, because they will. With plenty of money, worldwide established connections and large gringo-based communities in Costa Rica (many of whom run their own businesses that rely on the internet to contact their customer base), reliable U.S. companies may find a very large client base in the country.

In a world where technology never stands still, it will be interesting to see how quickly Costa Rica can really catch up with the bigger nations – broadband access for all, cheap rates and faster connections (current highest at 2mb). Of course money is not on the small Central American nation’s side. Despite being the richest nation in Central America, they really can’t compete with the likes of the United States and Japan, but give them their due course. With the free trade deal about to take effect and the likely addition of further network providers as well as more ‘competitive’ efforts from ICE, Costa Rica just might find its way.

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