Three networks, one of which you probably want
Georgia has three mobile networks — Magti, Silknet and Cellfie. All three sell prepaid tourist packages, all three cover the cities properly, and the difference between them only becomes obvious once you leave the tarmac. In town, any of them works. Above two thousand metres, one of them keeps working, and the gap is not subtle.
Data is cheap by European standards. A tourist bundle with tens of gigabytes and a month of validity costs less than dinner for two, and speeds in Tbilisi, Batumi and Kutaisi are genuinely fast. 4G is the default across the populated country, and 5G exists in parts of the biggest cities. Being online here is neither expensive nor complicated.
You will need your passport. SIM cards are registered to the buyer, the shop scans the document, and the number is active before you leave the counter, usually within ten minutes. No local address, no residency, no deposit. Bring the physical passport rather than a photograph of it, because the scanner wants the real thing.
What follows is coverage by region rather than by marketing map, the price gap between the arrivals kiosk and a shop three kilometres away, when an eSIM earns its keep, and the honest state of guesthouse wifi at the moment eight trekkers walk in with a day of photographs to upload.
What it costs, and where not to buy it
A tourist SIM from an operator shop in Tbilisi generally runs somewhere in the range of 10–30 GEL (2025) for a package with a generous data allowance and a month of validity. Promotions come and go, the three operators leapfrog each other constantly, and what you are quoted depends on the week. Treat that range as an order of magnitude, not a price list.
The airport is a different economy entirely. The same card, on the same network, sold in the arrivals hall for a multiple of what a city shop asks for the identical bundle. Nobody is being dishonest about it; they are simply selling convenience at three in the morning, and convenience at three in the morning is expensive everywhere.
Buying one, in practice
Operator shops are everywhere: on the main avenues, in the shopping centres, near the bus stations, and in every regional town of any size. Bring the passport, say how many days you are staying, and let the assistant pick the package. The tourist bundles are close enough in value that agonising over the comparison wastes an afternoon you could spend elsewhere.
English is spoken unevenly. In central Tbilisi you will be fine; in a small-town branch, expect to point at numbers and use a translation app. Remember also that the card is registered to your passport, so it is not something to hand on to a friend at the end of the trip — they would be using a number in your name.
The mountain question, answered honestly
Magti wins the mountain coverage war and it is not close. Along the Military Highway, in Stepantsminda, on the ridge below Gergeti Trinity, in Mestia and up most of the Enguri gorge, Magti holds a signal where the other two fade out. If your itinerary goes anywhere above the treeline, this is the only decision on this page that genuinely matters.
That said, winning is relative. Upper Svaneti and Tusheti are patchy on everything. Ushguli has service that comes and goes with the hour and the weather; the Mestia to Ushguli trek loses it for long stretches across the passes; Omalo has a signal of sorts and the Abano Pass road has none worth the name. Plan for hours offline, not minutes.
The practical consequence is downloading rather than upgrading. Offline maps for the whole country, accommodation confirmations, the trail track, the marshrutka timetable and something to read — all of it onto the phone while you are still in a city with wifi. No operator sells a package that conjures a tower into a valley that does not have one.
eSIM, and when it earns its keep
Modern phones take an eSIM, and both the Georgian operators and the international travel-eSIM providers sell data for Georgia that way. The appeal is obvious: you land already online, with no queue, no kiosk and no passport on a counter at midnight. The catch is the price per gigabyte and, sometimes, which local network the thing actually rides on.
Travel eSIMs bought abroad tend to cost more than a local SIM from a shop, and they do not always let you choose the underlying network, which matters enormously if Svaneti is on the plan. A reasonable compromise: an eSIM for the arrival day and the taxi, then a physical local SIM the following morning once the shops are open.
Coverage, region by region
Cities and main roads are a solved problem. Tbilisi, Batumi, Kutaisi, Telavi, the whole of the Kakheti wine valley and every stretch of the main east–west highway have fast, dependable 4G on all three networks. You can answer email from a café terrace in Sighnaghi without giving the connection a thought.
The gradient begins where the roads narrow. Coverage follows valleys and villages rather than summits, so you can have four bars in a settlement and nothing twenty minutes above it. What follows is what we have experienced on the ground rather than what the coverage maps promise, and it shifts with weather, season and how many people are on the same tower.
Guesthouse wifi, and what happens at six o'clock
Almost every guesthouse in Georgia advertises wifi, and almost every one has it, including places at the end of a dirt road in a valley with a single shop. The router is real, the line is real, and for a phone checking messages and loading a map it is entirely adequate for most of the day.
Then the trekking group arrives. Eight people come off the trail at six in the evening with a day of photographs to upload, and a connection sized for one family collapses to nothing. This is the most predictable thing about guesthouse wifi in the mountains: it is quick at seven in the morning and unusable in the two hours either side of dinner.
If you need to do actual work, do it early, or do it on mobile data, which in most guesthouse villages will beat the shared line anyway. Do not plan a video call from Ushguli, and do not promise one from Omalo. Tell the people at home you will be out of contact and let them be pleasantly surprised when you are not.
What to download before you leave the city
Georgia is easy to travel offline if you spend twenty minutes preparing. The country is small, the map files are light, and the things that actually go wrong — a missed junction on a gravel road, an unreadable sign, a guesthouse whose address exists only in Georgian — are solved by files sitting on the phone rather than by a bar of signal.
The script is worth having offline too. A translation app with the Georgian pack downloaded will read a menu board or a bus destination from a photograph, which matters far more in a Kutaisi bakery or at Didube station than in a central Tbilisi restaurant that already hands you an English card.
Five mistakes, so you skip them
Four of these we have made ourselves, and the first one costs the most money for the least gain.