Portugal coverage

What the Portugal numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 74 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 20 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 Portugal 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 MEO and Vodafone. 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 Portugal

• DIGI: DIGI says its 5G mobile network is now available on every line of the Lisbon Metro, so its customers keep a 5G signal on the city's underground railway.

Older networks in Portugal

• MEO switched 3G off municipality by municipality from 4 September 2023. The Azores went on 31 October 2023, and Lisbon, Porto, the whole Faro district in the Algarve and Madeira, including Funchal, went on 31 January 2024, the final date of the schedule.
• Vodafone Portugal, which launched 3G in the country in 2004, began a progressive switch off of its 3G network in July 2024 and is moving those frequencies to 4G and 5G.

5G in Portugal

• 5G reached 98.72 percent of Portuguese households in 2024, above the EU average of 94.35 percent, and Portugal has set a target of 100 percent by 2030. In sparsely populated areas the figure was 92.26 percent.
• Coverage on the faster 3.4 to 3.8 GHz band is much thinner: 71.38 percent of all households in 2024, but only 21.45 percent in sparsely populated areas, so 5G in rural Portugal mostly runs on lower frequencies.
• 5G SIM cards made up 27.49 percent of all SIM cards in Portugal in 2024, below the EU share of 35.56 percent. One Portuguese operator added 5G standalone to its offer in 2024.
• Portugal had assigned 61.11 percent of the EU's 5G pioneer band spectrum in 2025, below the EU average of 74.63 percent. In February 2025 ANACOM found that releasing the 2 x 5 MHz left unassigned in the 5G auction soon may be justified.

Network notes for Portugal

• Mainland Portugal, the Azores and Madeira, and the two archipelagos with each other, are linked by a domestic submarine cable ring, the CAM ring, in service since 1999. A contract signed on 13 March 2024 with Alcatel Submarine Networks, worth about 154.4 million euros, replaces it by the end of 2026.
• The new CAM ring will have 3,812 km of submarine cable in a ring layout with six fibre pairs and at least 150 Tbps of capacity, operated for 25 years by IP Telecom, part of the state infrastructure group Infraestruturas de Portugal. It also carries a sensing component for earthquake detection and climate monitoring.
• The cables linking individual islands within the archipelagos were left out of the new CAM ring project and can only be replaced after it is complete.
• A new operator entered Portugal's mobile market in November 2024, and the three established operators responded with larger data allowances, lower prices, reworked bundles and shorter minimum contract periods.
• The state concession for the new CAM ring is meant to keep a single public operator for the cables and to align telecom prices in the Azores and Madeira with those on the mainland.
• During the nationwide power cut of 28 April 2025, the prolonged loss of electricity knocked on into the mobile and fixed networks, affecting access to emergency services and communication between them, and access to 112 was heavily restricted on fixed lines.