Maldives coverage

What the Maldives numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 47 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 11 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 Maldives 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 Dhiraagu and Ooredoo. 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 Maldives

• Dhiraagu: Dhiraagu has operated since 1988. Its shareholders are Beyon, through BTC Islands, with 52 percent, the Government of the Maldives with 41.8 percent and the public with 6.2 percent.
• Dhiraagu: Dhiraagu reports coverage across all 187 inhabited islands, resort islands and the major industrial islands. It reached 100 percent mobile coverage of inhabited islands and resorts in 2008, introduced 3G in 2009, 4G in 2014 and 4G+ in Greater Male in 2015.
• Ooredoo Maldives: Ooredoo Maldives, 90.5 percent owned by Wataniya International, passed 426,000 subscribers in 2025 and reports 4G+ coverage across 100 percent of the country.
• Licence holders: Only Dhiraagu and Ooredoo Maldives hold the unified licence for all telecom services nationwide. Starlink Services Maldives holds an internet licence for satellite service to homes, small businesses, and vessels and aircraft of large enterprises.

5G in Maldives

• Dhiraagu launched commercial 5G in July 2019 in selected areas of three regions: Male and Velana International Airport, Addu City and Hithadhoo, and Kulhudhuffushi. At launch the only compatible handset was the Huawei Mate 20X.
• Ooredoo Maldives launched commercial 5G on 20 December 2020, covering a large share of Male including business hubs, hospitals and public spaces, for both prepaid and postpaid users.
• By 2025 Dhiraagu's 5G reached 73 percent of the population, covering Greater Male, the industrial islands in that region, Seenu Hithadhoo and Kulhudhuffushi City.
• Ooredoo Maldives reports that its 5G reached 80 percent of the population in 2025, which it describes as the widest 5G footprint in the country.

Network notes for Maldives

• In July 2026 the regulator counted 844,302 mobile subscriptions, 607,359 of them prepaid and 236,943 postpaid, a mobile teledensity of 135 percent measured against a resident population of 623,138.
• The regulator's count of mobile broadband subscriptions leaves out random pay as you go users, so casual pay as you go data users are not in that figure.
• International capacity is licensed to two gateway operators, WARF Telecom International and Ocean Connect Maldives, which provide the submarine fibre links in and out of the country.
• Dhiraagu runs a 1,430 km domestic submarine fibre network linking the atolls from north to south, and two Maldives to Sri Lanka cable systems. It is adding the SEA-ME-WE-6 system and the Dhivaru cable built with Google.
• Ooredoo Maldives landed the PEACE international submarine cable at Kulhudhuffushi in Haa Dhaalu, connected the Waldorf Astoria Ithaafushi resort by its own submarine cable, and approved a second nationwide domestic cable, NaSCOM2, costing up to MVR 162 million.