Norway coverage

What the Norway numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 97 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 31 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 Norway 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 Telenor and Telia. 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 Norway

• Telenor Norge: Telenor Norge is the largest mobile provider, with 40.4 percent of all mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025, down from 41.3 percent a year earlier and 44.5 percent in 2021.
• Telia Norge: Telia Norge held 32.8 percent of mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025. It leads the smaller mobile broadband segment, with 42 percent of the roughly 216,500 data only subscriptions.
• Ice: Ice is the challenger among the three network operators and the one gaining ground. Its share of mobile subscriptions rose from 11.7 percent in 2021 to 16 percent at the end of 2024, won at the expense of Telenor and Telia.
• Market size: Norway had about 6.12 million mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025, and the three largest providers together held 90.4 percent of them. Prepaid is a small niche: only 376,381 private prepaid cards were active in the last three months of the year.
• Providers without a network: The regulator stresses that smaller mobile brands without their own network offer the same coverage as the larger mobile companies, and calls them safe alternatives on both coverage and price.

Older networks in Norway

• Telenor closed its 3G network in January 2021. Telia shut its 2G network in 2025, and Telenor has announced that its own 2G network closes on 31 December 2027, with the freed frequencies going to 4G and 5G.
• Telia switched 2G off county by county from August 2025, ending with Oslo, Akershus, Drammen, Østfold and Vestfold on 2 December 2025. Its whole 2G network is now closed.
• When Telenor's 2G closes, services that rely only on 2G stop working. The regulator's checklist for any device still used for voice is a SIM that supports 4G and 5G, hardware that does too, support for VoLTE, and settings configured to use them.

5G in Norway

• Norway's first 5G frequencies were auctioned in June 2019. Ice, Telia and Telenor each won 2x10 MHz in the 700 MHz band, then used for digital television, and Ice also took 2x15 MHz at 2.1 GHz. The 700 MHz frequencies opened to mobile and 5G use from 1 November 2019.
• The 700 MHz licences carry road and rail duties. Telia's block obliges it to cover selected railway lines, and Telenor's obliges it to cover European highways and the coastal road from Mo i Rana to Bodø. No bidder took on the national roads.
• The main 5G band was auctioned in September 2021. Telenor won 120 MHz at 3.6 GHz, Telia and Altibox 100 MHz each and Ice 80 MHz, while all 590 MHz on offer across the 2.6 and 3.6 GHz bands was sold for NOK 3.33 billion after rural coverage discounts.
• All four winners of the 2021 auction accepted a rural build obligation in return for NOK 560 million off their prices, committing them to high speed wireless broadband for eligible homes and business premises in outlying districts.
• 5G building started in 2020. By the end of 2025 basic 5G reached 99.8 percent of Norwegian households across all operators combined, against 100 percent for 4G, and most counties are close to full household coverage.
• Land area is the gap. At the end of 2024, 5G covered 69.8 percent of Norway's land area, even though the government's goal was for 5G coverage by the end of 2025 to match what 4G offered in 2020.

Network notes for Norway

• The far north trails the rest of the country. At the end of 2024, 5G able to deliver 30 Mbit/s reached about 85 percent of households in Nordland and Finnmark and just under 89 percent in Troms, against 94.4 percent nationally.
• Only 21.9 percent of households had 5G at 100 Mbit/s from all three networks at the end of 2024, up from 8.2 percent in 2023. In Finnmark the figure was just 3.2 percent.
• Svalbard's connection to the mainland runs over two subsea fibre cables owned by Space Norway and in service since 2004. The owner puts their technical lifespan at the end of 2028, and says operation beyond that cannot be guaranteed.