Saudi Arabia coverage

What the Saudi Arabia numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 83 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 24 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 Saudi Arabia 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 STC and Mobily. 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 Saudi Arabia

• stc: stc reports that its nationwide 5G network reached 63 percent population coverage in Saudi Arabia in 2025. stc group has also partnered with AST SpaceMobile on space-based direct-to-device service to extend coverage into underserved areas.
• stc: stc provides VoLTE free of charge and Wi-Fi calling free to all its prepaid and postpaid voice customers. Wi-Fi calling needs a working VoLTE service and does not work while roaming, and VoLTE while roaming currently works only in the United States.
• Mobily: Mobily, founded and listed on the Saudi Exchange in 2004, ended 2025 with 14.4 million mobile subscribers, of whom 12.3 million were prepaid and 2.1 million postpaid, up 17.4 percent in a year.
• Mobily: By the end of 2025 Mobily had more than 7,600 5G sites across 61 cities, reaching over 96 percent of residents in the Kingdom's seven main cities. For the 2025 Hajj it expanded its 5G site coverage by 133 percent.
• Zain KSA: Zain KSA has operated since 2008 and had 8.3 million customers in the first quarter of 2026, 73 percent of them prepaid. Its network covers 99 percent of the population, and its 5G population coverage reached 66.7 percent.
• Virgin Mobile: The regulator handed out virtual operator licences in April 2014 to Virgin Mobile Saudi Arabia, hosted on the stc network, and to Jawraa, hosted on Mobily. Each licence was granted for ten years, with commercial service due within a year.

Older networks in Saudi Arabia

• stc announced the shutdown of its 3G services during 2023, starting in a few cities with completion planned for the third quarter. It kept 2G running so that phones limited to 2G or 3G could still make calls and send texts on its network.
• stc's published network plan for business customers set the fourth quarter of 2025 as the date to switch off its 2G network, as part of upgrading its 2G and 3G networks to 4G and 5G.

5G in Saudi Arabia

• Saudi Arabia launched 5G New Radio in 2019. The regulator lists it as the successor to 4G LTE, 3G UMTS and 2G GSM, the mobile technologies that came before it.
• The regulator has assigned mobile spectrum by auction since 2017. Its fourth auction offered 400 MHz in the 3500 MHz band, and the fifth offered 600, 700 and 3800 MHz spectrum.
• In the November 2024 auction, stc won 40 MHz at 600 MHz and 100 MHz at 3800 MHz, Mobily won 20 MHz at 700 MHz and 100 MHz at 3800 MHz, and Zain won 30 MHz at 600 MHz.
• That auction raised the total spectrum licensed for mobile networks from 1110 MHz to 1400 MHz, and made Saudi Arabia the first country in Europe, Africa and the Middle East to license the 600 MHz band for mobile use.
• The regulator set out the 600, 700 and 3800 MHz auction to improve 5G coverage in remote areas, raise service quality on roads, at border crossings and along railways, and lift internet speeds.
• For the 2025 Hajj season, 5G coverage in Makkah, Madinah and the Holy Sites reached 99 percent and 4G coverage exceeded 99 percent, backed by more than 10,500 Wi-Fi access points.
• Saudi Arabia held a spectrum auction on 23 August 2022 in the 2100 MHz band for 5G non-terrestrial networks, such as satellites and high-altitude platforms, promising to connect rural areas and bring fast internet onboard aircraft.

Network notes for Saudi Arabia

• The regulator counts about 21,000 villages and localities in the Kingdom whose coverage comes through national roaming between the operators.
• Local roaming lets a phone move onto another Saudi operator when its own has no coverage. It switches on automatically for voice and internet, costs nothing extra, and triggers a free text in Arabic and English.
• Mobile subscriptions in the Kingdom reached 68.2 million in 2024, growing 7 percent in a year.
• For the 2024 Hajj, operators allocated more than 6,200 towers across Makkah, Madinah and the Holy Sites, over 4,000 of them with 5G, a rise of 37 percent in 5G towers on the year before.
• The regulator runs a free coverage map service: enter a national address or pick a point on the map to see which operators' networks cover that location.
• In September 2025 two major submarine cables, SMW4 and IMEWE, were damaged in the Red Sea near Jeddah, disrupting connectivity across India, Pakistan, the Gulf and parts of Africa while traffic was rerouted.
• Zain is the Saudi landing party for the PEACE submarine cable. It also holds a stake in Blue Raman, a cable consortium of Google, Omantel and Sparkle, and is that system's landing party in the Kingdom.