Seychelles eSIM
Data for Seychelles on Airtel and Cable and Wireless, from $14.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and refills land on the line you already have, with nothing new to install.
- Networks
- Airtel and Cable and Wireless
- Typical speed
- 41 Mbps typical, 10 Mbps at busy times
- 5G
- 4G only
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for Seychelles
| Data | Validity | Price per GB | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | Never expires | $14.89 | $14.89 | |
| 3 GB | Never expires | $10.63 | $31.89 | |
| 5 GBMost travellers | Never expires | $9.78 | $48.89 | |
| 10 GB | Never expires | $8.89 | $88.89 |
Every plan works the moment you land. Unused data returns to your wallet when the line closes, and customers get at least 100 MB of free rescue data a month even at zero balance.
What 41 Mbps actually means in Seychelles
Typical download speed on Orbislo in Seychelles: 41 Mbps. That puts Seychelles well above the Africa median of 30 Mbps.
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 Seychelles on Airtel and Cable and Wireless. 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 Seychelles: 4G only. A well provisioned 4G cell comfortably outruns a congested 5G one, which is why the figure above is throughput rather than a network generation.
What data costs in Seychelles
A 500 MB plan for Seychelles starts at $2.50, which is $0.01 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 Seychelles it means the effective cost is nearer $0.00 a gigabyte than $0.01.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for Seychelles 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 Seychelles
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 Seychelles and it attaches to Airtel.
On landing there is one thing to check: 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.
Worth knowing about Seychelles
- From 1 December 2024 the Seychelles passenger allowance has included one electronic item, counted as a single telephone or one tablet or one laptop for each arriving passenger.
- Used personal effects come into Seychelles free of import tax only where the owner has both possessed and used them for twelve months or more. Something owned but not yet used is taxed at the ordinary rate on arrival.
- Goods posted to Seychelles purely for personal use, tobacco and alcohol aside, run duty free up to a customs value of SCR 3,000, and tax falls on whatever exceeds that. The parcel has to be in the importer's own name and cannot be meant for resale.
How Seychelles compares across Africa
- Regional typical speed
- 29.5 Mbps
- Upstream networks
- 2, Airtel, Cable and Wireless
- 5G
- 4G only
- Next fastest nearby
- South Africa, 42 Mbps
- Next slowest nearby
- Rwanda, 34 Mbps
- Cities with their own page
- 1: Victoria
