China coverage

What the China numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 41 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 10 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 China 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 China Unicom and China Mobile. 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.

Mobile operators in China

• China Mobile: China Mobile ended 2025 with 1,005 million mobile customers, 642 million of them on 5G, which is 63.9 percent of its base. It runs more than 2.77 million 5G base stations and reports continuous 5G coverage in every township and larger place nationwide.
• China Telecom: China Telecom had 438.65 million mobile subscribers at the end of 2025, up 14.13 million in the year, and 301.81 million of them were 5G network subscribers.
• China Unicom: China Unicom passed 357 million mobile billing subscribers in 2025. Through its co-build, co-share network it has more than 1.54 million mid-band 5G base stations and more than 1 million low-band base stations in service, which it says has markedly improved deep coverage.
• China Unicom: China Unicom reports that its mobile network reaches more than 99 percent of the population, and that it had deployed 5G-Advanced base stations in more than 330 cities by the end of 2025.
• China Broadnet: China Broadnet is the fourth holder of a 5G licence. It received a 5G licence in June 2019 alongside the three established carriers, and its management described the licence as granted to the national cable television and broadcasting industry.

Older networks in China

• China has no single national 2G or 3G switch-off date. The industry ministry lets each operator draw up its own exit plan, but requires it to warn users early and protect their interests before any shutdown, and its five-year plan for the industry, issued in November 2021, calls for speeding up 2G and 3G retirement.
• In August 2023 the industry ministry allowed China Telecom to refarm its 800 MHz spectrum, until then used for 2G, 3G and 4G, for 5G public mobile service.

5G in China

• The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued four commercial 5G licences on 6 June 2019, to China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Broadnet, the start of commercial 5G in China.
• In December 2018 the ministry gave China Telecom and China Unicom 5G trial spectrum in the 3500 MHz band, and China Mobile trial spectrum in the 2600 MHz and 4900 MHz bands, so a phone needs the matching 5G bands, n78 for 3.5 GHz and n41 or n79 for China Mobile, to use them.
• China had 4.838 million 5G base stations at the end of 2025, 37.6 percent of its 12.87 million mobile base stations and 34.4 for every 10,000 people. It also had 7.192 million 4G base stations.
• By the end of 2025, every township and more than 95 percent of administrative villages in China had 5G, and the upgraded 5G-Advanced network covered more than 330 cities.
• Of China's 1.827 billion mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025, 1.204 billion were 5G, a share of 65.9 percent that rose 9.2 points in a year.

Network notes for China

• Mobile internet traffic in China reached 395.8 billion GB in 2025, up 17.3 percent, and the average subscriber used 20.74 GB a month, rising to 23.04 GB in December.
• China's national telecom statistics exclude Hong Kong and Macao, so the mainland subscriber and base station figures do not describe either city, and the 2025 numbers are preliminary.