Costa Rican Cellphone Use Increases During the Holidays

Costa Rica News – At Christmas and New Year’s, ticos tend to use their cellphones much more. Consumption of both call service and Internet service increase in December for the last number of years.

Are people thinking about their loved ones more? Do they have more time on their hands with vacations from school and work?

This doesn’t just happen on those specific days, rather the whole month of December. This data has been revealed by the Superintendence of Telecommunications (Sutel).

In the first half of 2012, users conversed 645.6 million minutes per month. From November to December, the number of minutes per month rose significantly, from 671 million minutes to 731 million, an increase of 9%.

In 2014, we started seeing a change: globally there were less minutes being used to talk on the phone, and Costa Rica was not the exception. Ticos migrated to free messaging services like WhatsApp and Facebook.

The use of Internet, both mobile and fixed, increases every year. It now seems that everyone uses Netflix, Spotify or Waze. The appetite for the Internet has almost doubled in about two years.