India coverage

What the India numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 46 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 9 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 India 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 Jio and Airtel. 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 India

• Reliance Jio: Reliance Jio is India's largest mobile operator, with 506.03 million wireless subscribers at the end of July 2026, a count that includes machine to machine connections. It added about 2.45 million that month.
• Bharti Airtel: Bharti Airtel had 489.49 million wireless subscribers at the end of July 2026, and 99.12 percent of them were active on the network's peak day, the highest share among the major operators. It also holds 61.33 percent of India's machine to machine connections.
• Vodafone Idea: Vodafone Idea, sold as Vi, had 199.06 million wireless subscribers at the end of July 2026, of whom 83.97 percent were active on the peak day.
• BSNL: State owned BSNL had 93.18 million wireless subscribers at the end of July 2026, but only 55.02 percent were active on the peak day. BSNL and MTNL together hold 7.25 percent of India's mobile market.
• BSNL: BSNL is building its 4G on an Indian developed network stack from C-DOT, Tejas Networks and TCS. By 31 October 2025 it had installed 97,068 of 100,000 ordered 4G sites, 93,511 of them on air, with equipment that can be upgraded to 5G.
• Adani Data Networks: Adani Data Networks won 400 MHz in the 26 GHz millimetre wave band in the 2022 auction, for 212 crore rupees. The government expected that band to be used mainly for captive or private networks and fixed wireless access.

Older networks in India

• Airtel shut down its 3G network in Punjab on 18 October 2019 as part of a plan to phase out 3G across India, moving the 900 MHz spectrum to 4G. It kept 2G running for feature phones, and 3G only handsets fell back to voice calls.
• India's 4G saturation project also covers 6,279 villages that had only 2G or 3G mobile service, which are being upgraded to 4G.

5G in India

• India's July 2022 auction offered 72,098 MHz across ten bands and sold 51,236 MHz, 71 percent, for 1,50,173 crore rupees, the highest proceeds from any single Indian auction. No one bid for 600 MHz. Commercial 5G followed on 1 October 2022.
• Reliance Jio won 24,740 MHz for 88,078 crore rupees, including pan India 10 MHz in the 700 MHz band, the only 700 MHz sold, a band with a large range. Airtel won 19,867.8 MHz for 43,048 crore rupees and Vodafone Idea 6,228 MHz for 18,799 crore rupees.
• By 31 October 2025, 5G was available in 99.9 percent of India's districts with 85 percent population coverage, and operators had installed 5.08 lakh 5G base stations across every state and union territory.
• Jio runs its 5G as a standalone network with no dependence on its 4G core, on 700 MHz, 3,500 MHz and 26 GHz spectrum, and describes the 5G launched by other operators as non standalone, built on 4G.

Network notes for India

• Mobile access is still far denser in cities than in the countryside: at the end of July 2026 urban wireless teledensity was 143.86 percent, against 59.59 percent in rural areas.
• In July 2022 the government approved a 26,316 crore rupee project to bring 4G to 24,680 villages in remote and difficult areas that had no mobile coverage. By October 2025, 13,142 towers were working, covering 19,465 villages.
• A phone signal is extremely unlikely in India's trekking mountains, so trekkers are advised to leave their route and expected return date with their accommodation, which registers their whereabouts through the online C form.
• The Andaman and Nicobar Islands were connected to the mainland by a 2,300 km submarine cable from Chennai on 10 August 2020, serving Port Blair, Little Andaman and Swaraj Island, with a boost to 4G on the islands.
• Lakshadweep relied only on satellite links until January 2024, when a 1,868 km submarine cable from Kochi reached eleven islands, including Kavaratti, Agatti and Minicoy. Its bandwidth is available to every Indian operator.
• Under a Submarine Cable Resilience Programme run in 2025, every submarine cable operator serving India submitted plans for network redundancy and geographically diverse routes, and repair ships were readied with the required clearances.