Mongolia coverage

What the Mongolia numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 35 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 Mongolia 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 Mobicom and Unitel. 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 Mongolia

• Market: In August 2024 Mongolia had 4.9 million mobile subscriptions for a population of 3.5 million. Mobicom held 36.9 percent of the market and Unitel 34 percent, and operators earned an average of 16,544 tugrik per user a month.
• Mobicom: Mobicom is a consolidated subsidiary of Japan's KDDI, which has invested since its founding in 1995 alongside Sumitomo Corporation and Newcom. In 2017 it launched Mongolia's first carrier aggregation service, in Ulaanbaatar and Erdenet.
• Unitel: Unitel launched Mongolia's first 4G LTE network in 2016, according to its chief executive, and says mobile internet use grew tenfold in the years after.
• Starlink: On 6 July 2023 the regulator approved two licences for SpaceX's Starlink, allowing low orbit satellite internet to be sold in Mongolia.

5G in Mongolia

• Five operators received 5G spectrum licences in May 2025: Unitel, Mobicom, Skytel, GMobile and ONDO. Each was allocated 100 MHz, and existing 4G systems are to move to 5G on that spectrum through 2027.
• The rollout is tiered: Ulaanbaatar first, then provincial centres, then soum centres, with the selection terms asking for remote settlements to be reached as early as possible. Operators plan the work for 2025 to 2029 and budget 1.4 trillion tugrik over five years.
• Unitel lit Mongolia's first 5G test station on Sükhbaatar Square in August 2022 and tested in all 21 provincial centres in October 2023. Commercial service opened on 16 May 2025 in Ulaanbaatar and the 21 provincial centres, with no settings needed on a 5G phone.
• The national target set at launch is 5G coverage for 70 percent of the population by 2027, two years after commercial service began.

Network notes for Mongolia

• Regulator statistics for 2024 counted 4.89 million mobile users, 4 million of them on 4G, and 55,540 kilometres of transmission lines, 78 percent of it fibre optic.
• Landlocked between Russia and China, Mongolia reaches the internet over land. Mobicom's backbone has cross-border links with Chinese carriers and with Russia's Megafon and TTK, and the ERMC terrestrial cable runs from Europe through Russia and Mongolia to China.
• Coverage is concentrated in towns. British phones generally work in the cities, but large parts of rural Mongolia have no network coverage at all, and outside the capital only about 10 percent of roads are paved.