El Salvador coverage

What the El Salvador numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 34 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 8 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 El Salvador 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 Tigo and Claro. 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 El Salvador

• Claro: Claro El Salvador belongs to América Móvil. In the December 2019 AWS auction it won four of the twelve 5+5 MHz blocks on offer, bidding against Tigo, the only other participant. Three blocks, 30 MHz in all, went unsold.
• Claro: América Móvil tried to buy Movistar El Salvador as Telefónica left Central America, but the deal never closed because of competition conditions set by the regulator. América Móvil kept the Guatemalan unit instead.
• Tigo: Tigo says its 4.5G network reaches 95 percent of the population, about 5.7 million people, and that 5G is being added on top of that network step by step.
• Tigo: Tigo, the Millicom subsidiary, took five 5+5 MHz blocks in the December 2019 AWS auction by direct award, because it was the only registered bidder for that part of the band.
• Movistar: Movistar is run by General International Telecom El Salvador, a group of Salvadoran investors backed by Banco Atlántida. It bought 99.3 percent of Telefónica Móviles El Salvador for US$144 million, a deal completed in January 2022, and holds about 27 percent of mobile users.
• Movistar: Movistar was the only bidder for 30 MHz of extended AWS spectrum, 1,755 to 1,770 MHz paired with 2,155 to 2,170 MHz, which SIGET awarded to it in 2023 with nationwide coverage for 20 years to expand its 4G network.
• Digicel: Digicel, with about 13 percent of mobile users, agreed in September 2026 to sell its Salvadoran business to the owner of Movistar. The deal still needs regulatory approval and is expected to close in the first half of 2027.

5G in El Salvador

• Tigo switched on the country's first commercial 5G network on 28 October 2025, at 70 sites around greater San Salvador, Nuevo and Antiguo Cuscatlán and Puerto de La Libertad. It did not disclose which frequencies the network uses.
• Movistar's network branded 5G Ready is advanced 4G LTE running on its 850 MHz and 1,900 MHz spectrum. The company itself said in 2023 that no operator in the country then had 5G technology.
• As of July 2026 the tender for dedicated 5G spectrum was still pending. Tower company Proyectos Terrestres estimated that national 5G coverage would need 1,500 to 2,000 new sites, with shorter masts of 18 to 21 metres.

Network notes for El Salvador

• More than 12 million mobile lines were active at the end of 2025, up 7.5 percent in a year, with close to 85 percent of them prepaid. It reports mobile coverage over 96 percent of the national territory.
• El Salvador has no submarine cable and relies entirely on land links through neighbouring countries for international traffic. SIGET picked Liberty Networks in December 2025 to build the first one, due in service in the second half of 2028.
• Before the December 2019 AWS auction, El Salvador had only 207 MHz of spectrum available for mobile services. That auction, the first of its kind in 20 years, offered 120 MHz more.
• SIGET granted Tigo a temporary nationwide concession of 30 MHz in the 700 MHz band under resolution T-0705-2026, valid for 60 days from 31 July to 28 September 2026.
• SIGET's quality regulation defines an operator's coverage area as a place where users have better than a 90 percent chance of reaching the network, and caps dropped calls at 3 percent a month for each technology.
• The same regulation sets minimum monthly average download rates of 500 kbps on 3G and 1,700 kbps on LTE inside each operator's declared coverage area, measured daily between 6:00 and 23:00.
• In 2023 Movistar was moving radio equipment onto sites that had only broadcast 3G so that they would carry LTE, as part of a second investment phase of about US$50 million.