If your income depends on a stable connection, the area you pick in Costa Rica matters more than the country you picked. Nearly three in ten households here have no fixed internet at all. That gap is not spread evenly, and it sits heaviest in exactly the rural and coastal places that show up on relocation shortlists.
A new analysis from the Telecommunications Administration Chair at the Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED), built on figures from the telecom regulator SUTEL, maps that gap across the country. The regulator counts fixed subscriptions against population rather than households, which puts the national figure at 22 per 100 residents. Forty-two areas fall below that line, and five sit far below it.
| Area | Subscriptions per 100 residents |
|---|---|
| Guatuso | 3.4% |
| Los Chiles | 3.5% |
| Upala | 4.6% |
| Talamanca | 6.3% |
| La Cruz | 8.8% |
Nandayure, Matina, Buenos Aires, Alvarado, Abangares and Sarapiquí sit just above them. Read those names against a map and the pattern is obvious. Talamanca is Puerto Viejo and Cahuita. Guatuso sits in the northern lowlands near Tenorio Volcano National Park. Nandayure covers a stretch of the Nicoya Peninsula. La Cruz runs to the Nicaraguan border above Guanacaste’s beach towns. These are not remote outposts. They are places people move to on purpose.
One caveat matters before you plan around these numbers. They date from December 2023, and they count subscriptions against population, so one household line covers everyone under that roof. Measured the other way, against homes rather than people, national coverage has climbed steadily, from 64.6% of households at the end of 2023 to 66% at the end of 2024 and 71% during 2025.
The regulator’s 2024 report switched to districts and to that household measure, so its figures do not line up against the table above. What that leaves you with is a direction rather than a number. The areas listed have almost certainly improved since the count, but nothing published since tells you by how much.
What the 2024 report does show is where the shortfall sits now. The Central, Chorotega and Pacific Central regions all met or beat the national household penetration rate of 66%. Brunca, Huetar Caribe and Huetar Norte fell below it. Average download speeds split along the same line, running 122.1 Mbps in the Central region against 82.8 Mbps in Pacific Central, 74.3 in Chorotega, 61.5 in Huetar Caribe, 46.6 in Huetar Norte and 44.7 in Brunca.
Parts of that will surprise you. Santa Cruz in Guanacaste carries 21,915 fixed internet subscriptions, third highest of any district. Nosara runs 99% of its connections on fiber or coaxial cable. Tamarindo posts the fastest average download speed on the Chorotega side, and La Fortuna leads the Huetar Norte.
But read that fiber figure carefully, because it describes the share of existing connections that are high speed, not the share of homes that have one. A place can run almost entirely on fiber and still leave most of its houses unconnected. Nosara at 99% tells you the connections there are good. It does not tell you how many houses have one.
The reason your street may not have fiber has little to do with demand. It has to do with poles. Fiber optic lines and mobile base stations ride on electrical posts, and Costa Rica has more than 500,000 of them spread across eight electricity companies. A diagnostic by the Infrastructure Commission found that 95% of operators run into obstacles getting access.
Sometimes the pole is already full. Sometimes it is too short to carry another line safely. Sometimes it is in poor physical shape, or the permit to attach anything to it takes months to clear. Any one of those stops a build, which is why a neighborhood can sit a few kilometers from fiber and never get it.
Poles are only half the story. When the regulator asked people in the Huetar Norte why they had no fixed line, the answers pointed at the household rather than the network. Fifty-seven percent said the service cost too much. Another 14% said they did not know how to use it. Walter Herrera, who directs the regulator’s markets division, singled out that second number as the one worth pausing over, since no amount of fiber addresses it. For you the practical read is different. Low penetration in an area does not always mean no service reaches it. Sometimes the cable already runs past the door and the neighbors have decided they cannot justify the bill.
Mobile is what fills the hole. Fixed internet reached 71% of households during 2025, but mobile internet runs at 106% per inhabitant, roughly 5.5 million subscriptions in a place of about five million people. In the low-coverage areas, that is not a statistic. It is how people actually get online, through an LTE router or a satellite dish rather than a cable.
So test before you commit. Ask your landlord or seller what is physically installed at the address, not what is available in the district. Run a speed test standing in the room you would work from, at the hour you would work. Ask neighbors what happens in heavy rain, because saturated mobile cells and aging poles both fail in weather. If the answer is a mobile router, budget for a backup line on a second carrier. That advice applies whether you are arriving on a remote worker visa or buying a house outright.
José Roberto Santamaría Sandoval, who heads the UNED chair, said the divide is no longer a technology question. He said a family without access faces greater difficulty studying, working, starting a business, reaching public services or taking part in the digital economy, and that this turns into a social gap. He added that infrastructure alone is not enough, and that digital skills have to be built alongside it, particularly for people on lower incomes, with less schooling, older adults and those living outside the Greater Metropolitan Area.
The cost of the lag has been put in numbers. The Ministry of Science, Innovation, Technology and Telecommunications estimated in 2024 that Costa Rica forgoes up to $1.587 billion in economic development opportunity because of the accumulated delay in deploying next-generation telecom infrastructure. Santamaría framed what that means at community level, saying a place without good connectivity loses more than internet access. It loses the ability to attract investment, build businesses, support remote work arrangements, raise productivity and create jobs.
Some of the response is arriving piecemeal. UNED has installed ten satellite internet antennas through its RED UNED project, reaching rural, coastal and Indigenous communities with little or no connectivity and serving more than 250 students. The telecom sector itself is not struggling, having generated revenue of ₡804.95 billion during 2025, grown 4.9% and sustained 11,777 direct jobs.
The next pressure is already visible. Artificial intelligence tools demand more processing capacity and more electricity, and the analysis warns Costa Rica will need to strengthen both its energy supply and its technology infrastructure to meet that. Santamaría said the challenge is not simply adopting the technology but building the infrastructure, energy, regulation and skilled workforce to use it safely and sustainably. For the areas still waiting on a fiber line, that debate arrives well ahead of the connection.
