Costa Rican state-owned telco Kolbi – the telecom arm of utility firm Grupo Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad (Grupo ICE) – has announced that it has expanded the reach of its LTE-A network, and is offering access to the higher-speed platform at no additional cost. Customers within the coverage area and with a compatible device will be able to utilised speeds of up to 50Mbps/30Mbps (download/upload), the company claimed, adding that areas of Limon, Puntarenas, Alajuela and Cartago were now covered by the network, alongside sites in Ciudad Quesada, Paso Canoas, Alto de Guadalupe, Paseo Colon, La Sabana, Tibas, La Uruca and Montelimar. ‘We have worked on an aggressive expansion and evolution in our mobile networks, to offer customers the best coverage and speed while surfing the mobile internet. Every week we connect new locations with the 4.5G network,’ corporate director of Telecommunications at ICE, Jaime Palermo, was quoted as saying. The official notes that the upgrade to LTE-A has also improved the company’s 3G and 4G networks, which should now provide users with download speeds of 6Mbps and 10Mbps-12Mbps, respectively.
In a related development, Kolbi also announced that it will deploy fibre to 28 districts of Heredia as part of the Transformation of Information and Communication Technologies of Heredia (TTH) project. In total, the company will install 1,300km of fibre cable across nine cantons in the province, with work scheduled to be completed by December. Manager of the project, Herbert Barrot, was quoted as saying of the rollout: ‘With this development, more than 71,000 existing customers will be benefited, with the possibility of connecting more than 35,000 additional customers.’