Austria coverage

What the Austria numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 86 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 26 Mbps, is the one that matters. It is the speed in the worst tenth of the day, when the cell above the station is full and everybody around you is on it too. A country with a high median and a low floor is a country that works beautifully right up until the moment you actually need it.

If the trip depends on video calls or tethering, plan around the busy figure rather than the typical one.

What happens in Austria when the network is busy

Congestion is not a fault, it is a Tuesday evening. The question is what your eSIM can do about it, and for most travel eSIMs the answer is nothing: one wholesale agreement per country, one network, and no way out except buying a second eSIM from somebody else while standing in the street.

Here, Orbislo traffic runs over A1 and Magenta. When the network you are on degrades we move you to another one, mid trip, without you asking, and tell you afterwards rather than interrupting you at the time.

Network notes for Austria

• Licences from Austria's 2020 multiband auction required 700 MHz coverage of 98 percent of motorway and expressway length at 10 Mbit/s by the end of 2023, on stretches where the licensee already had masts or was given sites.
• The same 2020 licences required 700 MHz coverage of 98 percent of rail line length at 10 Mbit/s download by the end of 2023, subject to the same condition about existing masts or sites made available by the railway.
• In Austrian cities, the 2020 licence terms set 700 MHz coverage of 95 percent of the population at 30 Mbit/s download and 3 Mbit/s upload by the end of 2023, with a 90 percent population target for the 2100 MHz band.