Vatican City eSIM
Data for Vatican City on TIM, Vodafone, WindTre and Iliad, from $5.89. It never expires, tethering is included, and you install Orbislo once rather than once per trip.
- Networks
- TIM, Vodafone, WindTre and Iliad
- 5G
- yes, standalone
- Throttle
- None on metered plans
- Tethering
- Allowed on every plan
Plans for Vatican City
| 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 |
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.
Which networks you will be on
Orbislo carries traffic in Vatican City on TIM, Vodafone, WindTre and Iliad. 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 Vatican City: yes, 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 Vatican City
A 1 GB plan for Vatican City 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 Vatican City it means the effective cost is nearer $4.24 a gigabyte than $5.89.
Because nothing expires, the cheapest way to buy for Vatican City 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 Vatican City
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 Vatican City and it attaches to TIM. 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 Vatican City
- The international list of dialling codes records Vatican City State against country code 379 with the note that the code is reserved for future use, so the code exists on paper and carries no traffic.
- The same list records Vatican City State a second time, against country code 39, the code for Italy. A number here is reached on the Italian plan rather than on a code of its own.
How Vatican City compares across Europe
- Regional median
- 71 Mbps
- Upstream networks
- 4, TIM, Vodafone, WindTre, Iliad
- 5G
- Yes, through the Italian networks that cover the enclave from Rome
- Cities with their own page
- 1: Vatican City
