Türkiye coverage

What the Türkiye numbers mean

Two numbers matter and only one of them is the one every seller quotes. The typical speed, 57 Mbps, tells you what a good moment looks like.

The tenth percentile, 16 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 Türkiye 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 Turkcell 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 Türkiye

• Turkcell: Turkcell held 39.2 percent of Turkish mobile subscribers at the end of 2025, according to regulator data, down from 41.2 percent a year earlier, and 39.8 percent of mobile revenue.
• Turk Telekom: TT Mobil, the mobile arm of Turk Telekom, held 31.6 percent of subscribers at the end of 2025, up from 29 percent, but only 24.3 percent of mobile revenue. It carried 70.7 percent of the country's SMS traffic.
• Vodafone: Vodafone Turkey held 29.2 percent of subscribers at the end of 2025, down from 30.4 percent, and 35.9 percent of mobile revenue.
• Turkcell: Turkcell's mobile subscriber base passed 40 million for the first time in the second quarter of 2026, with 243,000 net additions in the quarter.

Older networks in Türkiye

• 3G still had 6.4 million subscribers in Turkey at the end of 2025. The service began in July 2009 and peaked at 65.9 million subscribers at the end of March 2016, just before 4.5G arrived.
• 4G, branded 4.5G, has run since 1 April 2016 and counted 91.2 million subscribers at the end of 2025. Only 77.4 million could use it, because the rest had a device or SIM card that does not support it.

5G in Türkiye

• BTK auctioned 400 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands on 16 October 2025, split into 11 packages. All 11 sold for 2.945 billion US dollars, or 3.534 billion including VAT.
• Turkcell took five packages for 1.224 billion dollars, Turk Telekom four for 1.094 billion and Vodafone two for 627 million.
• BTK set 1 April 2026 as the start of 5G service nationwide, with no change to existing tariffs. The licences run until 31 December 2042, and from 2029 to 2042 operators must put 5 percent of revenue into infrastructure each year.
• The licence terms raise the required share of domestically made network equipment from 45 percent in the 4.5G era to 60 percent, and require products whose rights belong wholly to Turkish firms, at 15 percent in the first stage and at least 30 percent overall, subject to availability.
• 5G was set to open in all 81 provincial centres first, with nationwide coverage targeted within two years. Just before launch, about 32 million of Turkey's roughly 95 million mobile phones were 5G compatible.

Network notes for Türkiye

• Turkey had 99.7 million mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025, a penetration of 115.8 percent, including about 11.9 million machine-to-machine lines.
• Turkey's 4G licences, auctioned in Ankara on 26 August 2015 with Turkcell, Vodafone and Avea bidding, run until 30 April 2029. Operators were allowed to start 4.5G service from 1 April 2016.
• More than 17.8 million mobile numbers were ported between operators in 2025, bringing the total since number portability began to 207.8 million by 31 December 2025.
• Average mobile use in the last quarter of 2025 was 466 minutes a month, the highest among the European countries in the regulator's comparison, and mobile broadband users averaged 20.6 GB of data a month.