St. Barthélemy eSIM
Data for St. Barthélemy on Orange, Digicel, Dauphin Telecom and Free Caraïbes, from $5.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and you install Orbislo once rather than once per trip.
- Networks
- Orange, Digicel, Dauphin Telecom and Free Caraïbes
- Real speed
- 37.6 Mbps median, 2.3 Mbps for the slowest tenth966 travellers, rolling 90 days
- 5G
- yes, non standalone
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for St. Barthélemy
| 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 | $1.34 | $26.89 |
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 37.6 Mbps actually means in St. Barthélemy
Travellers on Orbislo in St. Barthélemy see a median download of 37.6 Mbps, measured across 966 real sessions rather than a speed test we ran ourselves. That sits close to the Caribbean median of 37.6 Mbps, which makes St. Barthélemy an unremarkable place to be connected, in the good sense.
The tenth percentile drops to 2.3 Mbps, a long way below the median. In practice that means St. Barthélemy is quick when the cell is quiet and difficult when it is not. Download your maps and your boarding passes before you need them.
Maps, messaging, ride hailing and payment apps all work without complaint. Video calls connect but will drop resolution, and streaming is better set to standard definition than left on automatic. Tethering a laptop works for email and documents rather than for calls.
Which networks you will be on
Orbislo carries traffic in St. Barthélemy on Orange, Digicel, Dauphin Telecom and Free Caraïbes. 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 St. Barthélemy: 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 St. Barthélemy
A 1 GB plan for St. Barthélemy starts at $5.89, which is $5.89 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 St. Barthélemy it means the effective cost is nearer $4.24 a gigabyte than $5.89.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for St. Barthélemy 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 St. Barthélemy
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 St. Barthélemy and it attaches to Orange. 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.
Worth knowing about St. Barthélemy
- St Barthelemy sits inside the French overseas roaming perimeter. The Code des postes et des communications electroniques defines an overseas roaming service by naming metropolitan France, the overseas departments, Mayotte, St Barthelemy, St Martin and St Pierre and Miquelon.
- French law carries the operator obligations of EU Regulation 531/2012 over to those overseas roaming services, and it removed overseas roaming surcharges on voice calls and text messages from 1 May 2016 for customers of an undertaking running a radio network in the overseas territories.
- Operators must keep the civil identity information of a user until five years after the contract stops being valid, which is why a French line cannot be handed over anonymously.
- Routing emergency communications free of charge is a licence obligation on operators, who must take every measure that keeps those communications flowing.
How St. Barthélemy compares across Caribbean
- Speed rank
- 9 of 17 destinations we have measured in Caribbean
- Regional median
- 37.6 Mbps
- Consistency
- The slowest tenth still reaches 6 percent of the median
- Upstream networks
- 4, Orange, Digicel, Dauphin Telecom, Free Caraïbes
- 5G
- Yes, non standalone in Gustavia and Saint Jean, on Orange only
- Next fastest nearby
- Barbados, 38 Mbps
- Next slowest nearby
- Jamaica, 37 Mbps
- Cities with their own page
- 1: Gustavia
- tenth percentile
- 2.3 Mbps
- Behind these figures
- 966 travellers, rolling 90 days
