Ethiopia coverage

What the Ethiopia numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 21 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 5 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 Ethiopia 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 Ethio Telecom and Safaricom. 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 Ethiopia

• Ethio Telecom: The state-owned operator ended its 2025/26 financial year with 90.12 million customers in total and 72.09 million active mobile subscribers, of whom 51.53 million were active mobile data users.
• Ethio Telecom: Ethio Telecom ran 10,613 mobile sites at the end of 2025/26, including 454 rural solution sites for places with little or no grid power. It added 603 sites that year, 195 of them rural, covering 117 woredas and 492 villages.
• Ethio Telecom: Ethio Telecom launched VoLTE in December 2023 at the same price as ordinary calls with no subscription fee. Calls need a VoLTE-capable phone and a 4G or 5G SIM, and the operator says VoLTE also supports roaming.
• Safaricom Ethiopia: On 22 May 2021 Ethiopia awarded a nationwide licence to a consortium led by Safaricom with Vodafone, Vodacom, CDC, Sumitomo and DFC, ending the decades-long state monopoly. The group committed to invest 8 billion US dollars over ten years.
• Safaricom Ethiopia: Safaricom Ethiopia switched on in Addis Ababa on 6 October 2022 with 2G, 3G and 4G in 11 cities. Its licence required 25 percent population coverage, and it shares infrastructure and interconnects with Ethio Telecom.
• Safaricom Ethiopia: By 31 March 2026 Safaricom Ethiopia had 13.6 million customers active within 90 days, a network of 3,504 sites and 4G reaching 59 percent of the population, up from almost 50 percent and 3,141 sites a year earlier.

5G in Ethiopia

• Ethio Telecom began pre-commercial 5G on six sites in Addis Ababa on 9 May 2022 under a temporary spectrum approval from the Ethiopian Communications Authority, with Huawei deploying the network.
• Commercial 5G from Ethio Telecom went live on 9 September 2023 across 145 sites in Addis Ababa, after trials in Addis Ababa and Adama. A 5G-capable handset is required.
• By the end of its 2025/26 year Ethio Telecom's 5G reached 33 cities on 340 sites, with seven cities and 25 sites added during the year. Outside those cities, service falls back to 4G.

Network notes for Ethiopia

• Ethio Telecom's 4G reached 1,200 towns and 82.23 percent of the population in 2025/26, up from 70.83 percent. Geographic 4G coverage rose from 21.06 to 36.29 percent, so most of the land area still has no 4G.
• Only 3,279 of Ethio Telecom's mobile sites were connected by fibre by 2025/26. That is 96 percent of sites in Addis Ababa but just 19 percent in the regions, so capacity outside the capital is thinner.
• Unstable grid power is a known weak point. In 2025/26 Ethio Telecom installed 867 hybrid power systems at base stations, 215 new solar sites and 225 backup generators to keep masts running through outages.
• Ethio Telecom's internet capacity reached 4.3 Tb/s in 2025/26 after adding 1.8 Tb/s during the year, with its internet gateway at 2,040 Gb/s and content caches from five partners at 2,062 Gb/s.
• Ethio Telecom added 10.2 million lines of capacity in 2025/26, lifting total mobile network capacity from 104.8 million to 115.1 million, while 5G capacity reached 1.4 million after a net addition of about 81,000.