Costa Rican cellco Kolbi – part of state-owned utility firm Grupo Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (Grupo ICE) – is set to launch LTE-A services this month. In an interview with El Financiero, the head of the company’s infrastructure division German Sanchez explained that the new network would be capable of download speeds of up to 200Mbps, and would support the increasing popularity of bandwidth-intensive services such as video-streaming. The telco tripled its 4G base stations in 2017 and increased its 3G sites by 30%. The rollout programme featured deployments covering 220km of primary roads as well as busy indoor locations including several hospitals, malls and educational centres.
Kolbi’s move towards LTE-A is also partly a response to the planned upgrades of its rivals Movistar and Claro, following their acquisition of additional frequencies last year.