South Africa eSIM
Data for South Africa on Vodacom and MTN, from $7.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and refills land on the line you already have, with nothing new to install.
- Networks
- Vodacom and MTN
- Typical speed
- 42 Mbps typical, 10 Mbps at busy times
- 5G
- yes, non standalone
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for South Africa
| Data | Validity | Price per GB | Price | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | Never expires | $7.89 | $7.89 | |
| 3 GB | Never expires | $4.63 | $13.89 | |
| 5 GBMost travellers | Never expires | $3.78 | $18.89 | |
| 10 GB | Never expires | $3.09 | $30.89 | |
| 20 GB | Never expires | $2.84 | $56.89 |
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 42 Mbps actually means in South Africa
Typical download speed on Orbislo in South Africa: 42 Mbps. That puts South Africa 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 South Africa on Vodacom and MTN. 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 South Africa: 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 South Africa
A 100 MB plan for South Africa starts at $0.68, 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 South Africa it means the effective cost is nearer $0.00 a gigabyte than $0.01.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for South Africa 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 South Africa
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 South Africa and it attaches to Vodacom.
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.
Coverage across South Africa
The figures above cover South Africa as a whole, and a national figure hides real variation. We publish separate figures for Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, 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 South Africa
A provider may not activate a SIM until it has recorded the holder's details. Somebody who is not a South African citizen and not permanently resident gives their full names and surname, their passport number, at least one address and the country that issued the passport, and the provider verifies all of it against the identification document itself.
Worth knowing about South Africa
- That registration duty is written not to apply to a customer of a mobile provider outside the country who enters the coverage area of a South African provider and uses its system to make and receive calls, send data or reach other services.
- A lost, stolen or destroyed handset or SIM has to be reported to a police official at any police station, in person or through somebody authorised to do it for you, within a reasonable time of you realising.
- Providers are required to record which IMEI each number has been used with, and which numbers each IMEI has carried, and to hand that over within 12 hours when a lawful direction is produced.
- From any mobile phone in South Africa, 112 reaches all emergency services. The dedicated numbers are 10111 for the police and 10177 for an ambulance or the fire service.
- Planned power cuts, known as loadshedding, are far less frequent than before but still happen, and they can affect the availability of mobile networks and wifi as well as ATMs and traffic lights. A charged power bank is worth carrying.
- New rules gazetted on 23 January 2026 take effect twelve months later. From then, operators must roll unused voice, SMS and data bundles over at least once when they expire, automatically and free of charge, except bundles of seven days or less and uncapped, free or promotional ones.
- Under the same 2026 rules, a customer whose bundle runs out cannot be charged out-of-bundle rates unless they have opted in. Usage is paused until they buy a new bundle, which protects a prepaid balance from draining at pay-as-you-go prices.
- Operators must warn customers by SMS or push notification when a bundle is 50, 80 and 100 percent used, and must draw down the bundle with the earliest expiry date first.
- The 2026 rules also let a customer transfer all or part of a bundle, any number of times, to another SIM on the same network, and require the validity period to be extended when a network fault stops the bundle being used.
- Rules already in force since 28 February 2019 require operators to let customers opt out of usage alerts for voice, SMS and data, and to choose whether they accept being billed for data used outside a bundle.
- Hikers and sailors have their own lines. Wilderness Search and Rescue answers on +27 21 937 0300, and the National Sea Rescue Institute on 112 or +27 87 094 9774.
- South Africa runs a tourist crisis incident reporting line, 086 187 4911, for visitors caught up in a crime, while 10111 remains the number for a crime in progress.
How South Africa compares across Africa
- Regional typical speed
- 29.5 Mbps
- Upstream networks
- 2, Vodacom, MTN
- 5G
- Yes, non standalone
- Next fastest nearby
- Mauritius, 52 Mbps
- Next slowest nearby
- Seychelles, 41 Mbps
- Cities with their own page
- 3: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban
