Mexico eSIM
Data for Mexico on Telcel and AT&T, from $8.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and you install Orbislo once rather than once per trip.
- Networks
- Telcel and AT&T
- Real speed
- 44 Mbps median, 10 Mbps for the slowest tenth1,388 travellers, rolling 90 days
- 5G
- yes, non standalone
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for Mexico
| Data | Validity | Price per GB | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | Never expires | $8.89 | $8.89 | |
| 3 GB | Never expires | $5.63 | $16.89 | |
| 5 GBMost travellers | Never expires | $4.98 | $24.89 | |
| 10 GB | Never expires | $3.99 | $39.89 | |
| 20 GB | Never expires | $3.34 | $66.89 |
Every plan works the moment you land. Unused data returns to your wallet when the plan ends, and there is 100 MB of free rescue data on your account even at zero balance.
What 44 Mbps actually means in Mexico
Travellers on Orbislo in Mexico see a median download of 44 Mbps, measured across 1388 real sessions rather than a speed test we ran ourselves. That puts Mexico well above the North America median of 34 Mbps, and 80th out of the 159 destinations we have measured.
The tenth percentile is 10 Mbps. That gap between the median and the floor is normal and it is where the frustration lives: the connection is quick most of the time and noticeably slow in the busiest few percent of moments, typically at transport hubs at peak hour.
That is enough for everything most travellers do: maps, messaging, video calls, streaming at high definition, and tethering a laptop for ordinary work. It is not enough to be casual about uploading a day of raw photographs.
Which networks you will be on
Orbislo carries traffic in Mexico on Telcel and AT&T. Your phone is not tied to one of them. When the network you are attached to congests or drops, the profile moves you to the other, and it happens without a prompt and without you noticing anything except that the connection kept working.
This matters more than the headline speed. Almost every travel eSIM sold today resells a single upstream agreement per country, so when that one network has a bad hour you have a bad hour with it and your only option is to buy a second eSIM from somebody else. A profile with more than one network behind it can make a decision you never see.
5G in Mexico: yes, non standalone. Worth knowing that 5G on a travel profile is normal rather than special, and that the tenth percentile above is the number that will decide how the trip feels, not the generation label in the status bar.
What data costs in Mexico
A 100 MB plan for Mexico starts at $0.30, which is $0.00 a gigabyte. That is the number to compare between providers, because a headline price attached to a different allowance tells you nothing.
The comparison most providers would rather you did not run is cost per gigabyte actually used. Independent surveys of travel data put the share of purchased data lost to expiry between 20 and 35 percent, because a plan that expires on day thirty deletes what you did not get through. Orbislo data has no expiry date, so the gigabyte you paid for is still there on the next trip. At the same headline price that is 25 to 40 percent more usable data, and in Mexico it means the effective cost is nearer $0.00 a gigabyte than $0.00.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for Mexico is to buy slightly less than you think you need and top up if you run out. Topping up takes about ten seconds and does not involve installing anything. Buying too much is the expensive mistake everywhere else and merely a neutral one here.
Landing in Mexico
Install before you fly, on your home wifi. The profile downloads while you still have a connection you trust, then sits dormant until you land in Mexico and it attaches to Telcel. Median time from tapping install to having service across all Orbislo orders is 41 seconds.
On landing there is one thing to check and it is the thing that goes wrong about sixty percent of the time people tell us they have no service: data roaming has to be switched on for the Orbislo line. It is off by default on both iOS and Android, and it has nothing to do with roaming charges here, because the plan is prepaid and there is no bill to run up. Turn it on for the Orbislo line and leave it off for your home line, and your home number keeps working for calls and bank codes without costing anything.
Coverage across Mexico
The measurements above are aggregated across Mexico, and a national median hides real variation. We publish separate figures for Mexico City, Cancun, Tulum and Oaxaca, because the difference between a capital and a coastal town is usually larger than the difference between two countries.
Outside the cities, coverage follows the same pattern it does everywhere: the main roads and the tourist corridors are well served, and it thins in the mountains and on the water. No travel eSIM changes that, because it is the same physical network the local population uses. What a multi network profile changes is which of the available towers you get to use.
Getting a local SIM in Mexico
Every SIM sold in Mexico, plastic card or eSIM, can reach only emergency numbers until it is linked to a holder. A foreign visitor is identified by passport or by a temporary CURP for foreigners, and the linking is done either at an operator's counter or remotely on a platform that also asks for a liveness check.
What is restricted in Mexico
- Handsets without Mexican type approval: Mexican operators may not activate handsets that lack Mexican type approval. The security and justice guidelines exempt any device using international roaming, which is how a travel eSIM connects, so a foreign phone on a roaming plan is not caught by the rule.
- Stolen, lost and cloned IMEIs: Operators must check every handset joining their networks against a register of IMEIs reported stolen, lost or duplicated, refreshed and swapped between operators every 24 hours. The register must also hold devices reported in countries that have signed agreements on this with Mexico.
Worth knowing about Mexico
- Lines that reach Mexico over international roaming sit outside the linking scheme for now. The ninth transitory article of the rules says the regulator will set out how roaming lines are to be linked only once the 2026 football World Cup has finished.
- A Mexican line that is never linked to a holder is switched off and can then only receive the national alert messages and call emergency and citizen service numbers.
- One person may hold at most ten linked mobile lines in Mexico. Companies are outside that cap, and a sole trader has to produce a tax status certificate to be treated the same way.
- Calls to 911 and to the 089 anonymous report line are free and unrestricted, including from a phone with no credit or with restricted service. Operators may not bill the caller for those calls or for the texts, data SMS and HTTPS messages tied to an emergency call.
- Calls and texts to 911 must reach the emergency centre with the caller's real time position, taken from the handset or the network, with Advanced Mobile Location among the first methods operators are told to use.
- 911 is the single number for medical, security and civil protection emergencies anywhere in Mexico, and 089 is the separate line for reporting a crime anonymously.
- The emergency and citizen service numbers an unlinked Mexican line can still dial are 911, 089, 088, 074 and 079, together with the operator's own customer service line.
- Linking a Mexican line to its holder costs nothing. Operators may not charge for linking, unlinking or checking which lines sit in a person's name, and the platforms for it must open free on prepaid or postpaid lines whatever the balance.
- Thirty days after the linking rules took effect, retailers could sell only switched off SIM cards and eSIMs. The exception is a SIM that is technically unable to make voice calls, send texts or place calls over the internet.
- When the authorities declare an emergency or disaster, operators must switch on new lines in the affected zone with full service and no linking for fifteen days, or longer if the regulator decides. After that the lines are disabled until linked.
- On 25 June 2026 the regulator gave unlinked prepaid lines individual deadlines set by the last digit of the number, falling between August and December. Postpaid lines, already tied to a person when contracted, need no new step.
- Prepaid credit left unused when it expires is not lost. Under the 2025 telecommunications law it must be added back to the line if the holder tops up again within a year of the expiry date.
- Mexican law requires internet access to be delivered at the contracted capacity, speed and quality whatever the content, origin, destination, device or application, so an operator may not treat a calling or messaging app differently from other traffic.
- Operators must block content, apps or services when a subscriber expressly asks, and the law forbids stretching such a block to anything the subscriber did not request or using it to harm internet services and applications arbitrarily.
- Mexican operators must hand over mobile handsets unlocked on both prepaid and postpaid plans, so a phone bought from a Mexican operator works on any technically compatible network.
How Mexico compares across North America
- Speed rank
- 3 of 10 destinations we have measured in North America
- Regional median
- 33 Mbps
- Consistency
- The slowest tenth still reaches 23 percent of the median
- Upstream networks
- 2, Telcel, AT&T
- 5G
- Yes, non standalone
- Next fastest nearby
- Canada, 58 Mbps
- Next slowest nearby
- Panama, 36 Mbps
- Cities with their own page
- 4: Mexico City, Cancun, Tulum, Oaxaca
- tenth percentile
- 10 Mbps
- Behind these figures
- 1388 travellers, rolling 90 days
