Portugal eSIM
Data for Portugal on MEO and Vodafone, from $5.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and you install Orbislo once rather than once per trip.
- Networks
- MEO and Vodafone
- Real speed
- 74 Mbps median, 20 Mbps for the slowest tenth1,240 travellers, rolling 90 days
- 5G
- yes, non standalone
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for Portugal
| Data | Validity | Price per GB | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | Never expires | $5.89 | $5.89 | |
| 3 GB | Never expires | $2.63 | $7.89 | |
| 5 GBMost travellers | Never expires | $1.98 | $9.89 | |
| 10 GB | Never expires | $1.49 | $14.89 | |
| 20 GB | Never expires | $1.19 | $23.89 | |
| 50 GB | Never expires | $1.16 | $57.89 |
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 74 Mbps actually means in Portugal
Travellers on Orbislo in Portugal see a median download of 74 Mbps, measured across 1240 real sessions rather than a speed test we ran ourselves. That sits close to the Europe median of 71 Mbps, which makes Portugal an unremarkable place to be connected, in the good sense.
The tenth percentile is 20 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.
At these speeds nothing on a phone is limited by the connection. Video calls are comfortable, a laptop can be tethered for a full working day, and large photo backups finish without planning around them.
Which networks you will be on
Orbislo carries traffic in Portugal on MEO and Vodafone. 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 Portugal: 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 Portugal
A 500 MB plan for Portugal starts at $0.32, 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 Portugal it means the effective cost is nearer $0.00 a gigabyte than $0.00.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for Portugal 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 Portugal
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 Portugal and it attaches to MEO. 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 Portugal
The measurements above are aggregated across Portugal, and a national median hides real variation. We publish separate figures for Lisbon, Porto, Madeira and Algarve, 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.
Worth knowing about Portugal
- Portugal is inside the roam like at home area, so an allowance bought in another country on that list is used here at the price it costs at home.
- The Azores and Madeira count inside that area in their own right and are named separately on the list of places where a European allowance travels without a surcharge, so an island leg costs no more than the mainland.
- On a MEO prepaid plan with compulsory top ups, a missed top up deadline stops outgoing calls but keeps incoming calls for 90 more days. After that the card expires and the remaining balance and loyalty points are lost, unless it is topped up within those 90 days.
- MEO prepaid plans without compulsory top ups stay active only if the line makes or receives a paid call every 90 days. A card with no usage, payments or top ups for 30 days is also charged an inactivity fee of 1.80 euros, announced by SMS, on plans with no maintenance charge.
- Portuguese law entitles a customer to a credit when a service is down for more than 24 hours in a billing period through no fault of their own. On a prepaid line the operator adds it to the balance without being asked, and an outage lasting more than 15 days allows the contract to be cancelled at no cost.
- When a Portuguese prepaid number moves to another operator, the old operator must refund the remaining balance on request within ten working days, and any fee for the refund is capped at 1 euro.
- Under the EU fair use rules, a home operator can add roaming surcharges only after watching a customer's usage and presence for at least four months and finding evidence of abusive or anomalous roaming, and it must warn the customer before charging anything extra.
- EU roaming rules treat freephone, premium and shared cost numbers as value added services, so calling a Portuguese freephone number on a plan from another EU country can cost more than the domestic price. The home operator must send a free message about that risk on arrival.
- On ships and aircraft, phones can connect to onboard satellite networks that sit outside the EU roam like at home price. EU rules require home operators to take reasonable steps to protect customers from those charges, such as letting them opt out of such networks free of charge.
- On entering Portugal, a traveller on a plan from another EU country must receive a free automatic message with personalised prices, including VAT, for calls and SMS there, unless they have told their operator they do not want it.
- After the power cut of 28 April 2025, ANACOM recommended upgrading Portugal's public warning system to support cell broadcast and setting a minimum run time for the batteries and generators that keep network equipment working.
How Portugal compares across Europe
- Speed rank
- 20 of 47 destinations we have measured in Europe
- Regional median
- 71 Mbps
- Consistency
- The slowest tenth still reaches 27 percent of the median
- Upstream networks
- 2, MEO, Vodafone
- 5G
- Yes, non standalone
- Next fastest nearby
- Belgium, 77 Mbps
- Next slowest nearby
- Slovenia, 74 Mbps
- Cities with their own page
- 4: Lisbon, Porto, Madeira, Algarve
- tenth percentile
- 20 Mbps
- Behind these figures
- 1240 travellers, rolling 90 days
