Ivory Coast coverage

What the Ivory Coast numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 30 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 7 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 Ivory Coast 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 Orange and MTN. 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 Ivory Coast

• Orange: Orange Côte d'Ivoire is the largest operator, with 30,120,625 mobile subscriptions at 30 June 2026 in the regulator's provisional count, about half of the national total of 60,401,530. Of its lines, 39.5 percent were hybrid plans rather than pure prepaid.
• MTN: MTN Côte d'Ivoire had 17,339,031 mobile subscriptions at 30 June 2026, up 1.3 percent in a year, and 14,491,369 mobile internet subscriptions, according to the regulator. 99.5 percent of its mobile lines were prepaid.
• Moov Africa: Moov Africa Côte d'Ivoire grew fastest of the three in the year to 30 June 2026, adding 8.2 percent to reach 12,941,874 mobile subscriptions, with 10,620,459 mobile internet subscriptions.
• All three: Each network holds an individual category C1A licence, awarded by ministerial orders 198, 199 and 200 of 18 March 2016 to Atlantique Télécom Côte d'Ivoire, which now trades as Moov Africa, Orange Côte d'Ivoire and MTN Côte d'Ivoire.
• Orange: In the regulator's 2025 coverage figures, Orange's 4G reached 94.89 percent of the population and 78.81 percent of the territory, and its 2G reached 96.63 percent of people, the widest footprint of the three.
• MTN: In the regulator's 2025 coverage figures, MTN's 4G reached 73.55 percent of the population but only 42.72 percent of the territory, while its 2G and 3G each reached more than 93 percent of people.
• Moov Africa: In the regulator's 2025 coverage figures, Moov Africa's 4G reached 55.71 percent of the population and 9.96 percent of the territory, and its 3G just 46.63 percent of people, so beyond that footprint its customers are on 2G only.

Older networks in Ivory Coast

• Retiring 2G and 3G is still only a future prospect. The regulator's August 2026 consultation describes every licensed network as running 2G, 3G and 4G, with all voice calls still carried over 2G or 3G, even for customers with 4G phones.
• The regulator's own assessment is that basic feature phones cannot use VoLTE or Wi-Fi calling and depend on 2G or 3G, and that entry level smartphones rarely support VoLTE, so switching those networks off would cut such handsets off.

5G in Ivory Coast

• On 19 December 2023 the regulator authorised 5G in the 3300 to 3600 MHz band and split it into three 100 MHz blocks: 3300 to 3400 MHz for Moov Africa, 3400 to 3500 MHz for Orange and 3500 to 3600 MHz for MTN.
• The same decision required each licensee to offer 5G to the public by 10 January 2024 at the latest, at minimum in the five cities hosting the Africa Cup of Nations. Use of the band is non-exclusive until the band has been re-planned, so operators must coordinate with its current users.
• Experimental 5G frequencies were first authorised on 28 October 2021, and the Council of Ministers adopted a 5G roadmap on 22 December 2021 that aimed for a commercial opening in 2023.
• On 11 June 2026 the Minister of Digital Transition, Djibril Ouattara, announced that 5G deployment would begin in July 2026, with every city of more than 25,000 inhabitants to be covered progressively in a first phase.

Network notes for Ivory Coast

• No Ivorian operator sells VoLTE or Wi-Fi calling nationally. The regulator ran a consultation from 10 August to 11 September 2026 on a framework for introducing both, and notes that operators' declared 4G coverage already exceeds the 50 percent of population it considers enough for VoLTE.
• When the regulator launched its coverage mapping tool in July 2023, it said about 500,000 people lived in 598 localities not covered by any telecom network. The tool at cartodonnees.artci.ci shows coverage locality by locality.
• The government aims, over the four years from June 2026, to bring GSM coverage to every locality of more than 800 inhabitants. Starlink Network CIV received an initial twelve month authorisation to sell fixed satellite internet from July 2026.
• In the regulator's audit of the first half of 2024, covering 71 localities and 51 road routes, call failure on the roads ran at 6.60 percent on Orange, 7.81 percent on MTN and 10.18 percent on Moov Africa, levels the audit called very high.
• On the same roads only Orange kept dropped calls within the 2 percent threshold, at 1.98 percent, against 2.67 percent on MTN and 4.55 percent on Moov Africa.
• Under a May 2025 decision, an operator can buy national roaming on a rival's network where it has no coverage, for up to three years, or five for a new entrant. Customers roaming this way must receive calls and texts free, reach emergency numbers free and be told whenever they switch network.
• On 14 March 2024 a suspected underwater rock slide off Côte d'Ivoire took the WACS, ACE, SAT-3 and MainOne cables offline where they converge along the coast. The country suffered a near-total internet outage, and the undamaged Moov Africa (MTWA) cable kept some connectivity running.
• Côte d'Ivoire lands five submarine cables, ACE, MainOne, MTWA, SAT-3 and WACS, and has a single internet exchange point, CIVIX, where local networks exchange traffic without sending it abroad.
• At 30 June 2026 the country had 5,889,600 Mbps of international bandwidth installed, 49 percent of it in use. MTN's capacity was fully used and MainOne's 97 percent used, while Bayobab's 2,600,000 Mbps ran at 8 percent.
• Mobile data traffic reached about 1.99 billion gigabytes in 2025, up 40.8 percent on 2024, and Orange's network carried half of it.