The World’s 10 Largest Mobile Operators by Subscriber Numbers in 2026

It sounds like a simple question, but subscriber numbers have become increasingly difficult to compare. Some operators include Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) SIMs in their reported mobile totals, while others report them separately. Some include fixed wireless access connections, and multinational groups sometimes quote subscriber numbers from associates in which they own only a minority stake.

With IoT connections now running into billions globally, simply taking the headline numbers can produce a rather misleading league table.

We have therefore attempted a slightly different comparison: the world's largest mobile operators and operator groups by mobile subscriber numbers, excluding M2M and IoT connections as far as the published data allows.

The figures use the latest information available at the end of August 2026, generally June or July 2026. They should be treated as approximate because reporting methodologies are not standardised between operators.

Rank Operator / Group Mobile subscribers excluding M2M/IoT

1         China Mobile         ~1.011 billion

2         Bharti Airtel            ~594 million

3         Reliance Jio            ~479 million

4         China Telecom        442 million

5         China Unicom         >357 million

6         MTN Group         318 million

7         América Móvil       ~300 million

8         Vodafone Group      279 million

9         Orange Group        ~261 million

10         e&                         ~245 million

China Mobile remains in a league of its own. At the end of June 2026, the operator had approximately 1.011 billion mobile customers. What makes the distinction particularly important is that China Mobile also had 1.511 billion IoT card connections. Those IoT connections are reported separately and are therefore not included in the figure above.

The scale difference is remarkable. China Mobile has more IoT connections than it has human mobile subscribers, and its mobile customer base alone is almost twice the size of the next operator group.

Bharti Airtel takes second place when its Indian and African businesses are combined. The latest TRAI figures show Airtel with around 489.5 million wireless connections in India, but approximately 84.45 million of these are M2M connections. Removing these gives just over 405 million Indian consumer mobile subscriptions. Airtel Africa reported another 189 million customers at the end of June 2026, producing a combined figure of roughly 594 million.

This illustrates why simply using operator headline subscriber numbers can be problematic. India now has 137.7 million cellular M2M connections, and TRAI explicitly states that its wireless subscriber figures include M2M connections.

The same adjustment changes the picture for Reliance Jio. TRAI reported around 506 million wireless connections for Jio at the end of July, but 26.56 million were M2M connections. That leaves approximately 479 million conventional mobile subscriptions, putting Jio comfortably in third place rather than above Airtel when Airtel's African operations are included.

Jio itself reports a much larger overall customer base of more than 533 million because its broader digital services reporting also reflects the rapid expansion of its fixed broadband and JioAirFiber businesses. This is another reason why company-level customer numbers cannot always be compared directly with mobile subscriber numbers.

The next two positions belong to China's other major state-owned operators.

China Telecom reported 442.43 million mobile subscribers at the end of June 2026, including 322.5 million 5G network subscribers. China's enormous mobile IoT population is counted separately from conventional mobile telephone users in national statistics.

China Unicom is slightly more difficult. Its 2025 annual report said that the number of mobile billing subscribers had exceeded 357 million. More recent reporting increasingly uses a much broader "connectivity subscribers" measure combining mobile, broadband, IoT and other connections, so I have retained the latest clean mobile-only figure rather than trying to derive a misleading number from the new KPI.

Africa's largest operator group, MTN, comes next. MTN reported 317.7 million active subscribers across 19 markets at the end of June 2026. More than 179 million of these were active data users.

América Móvil, owner of brands including Claro, Telcel and A1, reported 334.3 million wireless lines at the end of June. The difficulty is that this figure includes M2M subscriptions in several operations. For example, its Austria and Eastern Europe total alone includes 11.28 million A1 Digital M2M subscriptions, while Claro Brazil also reports substantial M2M additions. Once these are removed, I estimate the conventional mobile base to be around 300 million.

This estimate is necessarily less precise than the China Mobile or Vodafone figures because América Móvil does not publish a single group-wide mobile total excluding M2M.

Vodafone Group is much cleaner. Its 2026 annual report gives 279 million mobile customers while separately reporting 244 million IoT connections. This makes Vodafone one of the easiest multinational operators to compare for this exercise.

Orange reported 321.3 million mobile accesses at the end of June 2026, boosted significantly by the full consolidation of MasOrange in Spain. Its detailed KPI reporting includes M2M within parts of the mobile base, and removing those connections brings the conventional mobile total to roughly 261 million. Orange's Africa and Middle East business alone now serves around 180 million mobile customers, showing how important that region has become to the Group.

Finally comes e&, formerly Etisalat Group. Its aggregate subscriber base reached 251.5 million at the end of June 2026 following the consolidation of businesses including Telenor Pakistan and its expanded international portfolio. The headline figure contains a relatively small number of fixed subscribers as well as mobile connections, so a reasonable mobile-only estimate is around 245 million.

The bottom of the table is the least certain. Deutsche Telekom is very close to the top-ten boundary, but producing a comparable 2026 group mobile subscriber figure is now difficult. T-Mobile US changed its reporting in the first quarter of 2026 and now emphasises postpaid accounts rather than total customers. At the end of 2025 it had 142.4 million US customers, while Deutsche Telekom currently reports another 123.7 million mobile customers across Germany and its other European operations. However, the German figure explicitly includes substantial M2M SIMs, particularly automotive connections.

Depending on exactly how M2M, broadband and other non-phone connections are treated, Deutsche Telekom and e& could therefore exchange places around the tenth position.

Another operator group that can appear much larger in some rankings is Singtel. This is largely because Singtel has major investments in operators including Bharti Airtel, Telkomsel, AIS and Globe. Adding all of their subscribers to Singtel's total while also ranking those operators or groups separately would effectively count the same subscribers more than once. For this comparison, I have therefore concentrated on controlled operator businesses rather than attributing 100% of associate subscribers to their shareholders.

The exercise also highlights how dramatically the meaning of a "mobile connection" is changing.

China Mobile alone has more than 1.5 billion IoT connections. Vodafone has 244 million IoT connections, while India's M2M base has already reached almost 138 million. In many cases, an operator's total number of network connections is therefore substantially larger than the number of people actually using its mobile services.

For traditional mobile subscriber scale, however, the picture remains clear. China and India dominate the top of the global rankings, followed by large multi-country groups across Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.

And China Mobile, with more than one billion conventional mobile customers before its enormous IoT business is even counted, remains comfortably the largest mobile operator in the world.

Related Posts: 

• Operator Watch Blog: A Billion for China and China Mobile
• Operator Watch Blog: World's Largest Mobile Networks by Data Traffic - Q1 2024
• Operator Watch Blog: 8.05 Billion Mobile Subscribers with 5.22 Billion Unique by End of 2020
• Operator Watch Blog: World's Largest Mobile Networks by Data Traffic - March 2021 

Cloud Native Progress and Pain Points According to Orange

Four years ago, the idea of cloud native in telecom was mostly aspirational—an ambitious leap from legacy architectures toward agility, automation, and scale. Today, while the journey is well underway, the destination is still far off.

At the recent Telco to Techco session, Philippe Ensarguet, VP of Software Engineering at Orange, took to the stage to assess the industry's real progress—and expose where it’s still struggling.

Telcos Are Still Caught Between Two Worlds

Many telecom functions are now containerised, but Philippe makes it clear: that doesn’t mean they’re cloud native.

“The ‘C’ in CNF must stand for Cloud Native, not just Container.”

Cloud native isn’t just a new way to package software—it’s a new way of building, deploying, and managing it. And that shift is proving to be far more complex than simply adopting Kubernetes or moving to public cloud.

Legacy virtualised network functions (VNFs) weren’t built for the dynamic, distributed nature of cloud platforms. Trying to retrofit them often results in complexity without the expected benefits.

What’s Working: Areas of Maturity

Despite the challenges, some progress is undeniable:

✅ Infrastructure Automation

Telcos like Orange have built robust cloud native platforms based on open technologies. The ability to scale infrastructure efficiently and reliably is now a reality.

✅ GitOps & Lifecycle Management

Cloud native lifecycle tooling—especially GitOps—is maturing. Orange, for example, manages diverse vendors through a unified GitOps-based integration platform called Network Integration Factory Tooling Zone.

✅ Open Source Participation

Open ecosystems are no longer optional—they’re essential. Orange is actively involved in Project Sylva (under Linux Foundation Europe) to define open, telco-grade cloud infrastructure.

What’s Still Holding Us Back

🛑 Skills Gap

Cloud native demands both hard skills (microservices, APIs, automation) and soft skills (agile mindsets, DevOps culture). These aren’t always easy to find—or to develop—in traditional telco teams.

🛑 Vendor Maturity

While some vendors are rearchitecting their software, others are just lifting old VNFs into containers. Philippe emphasises that cloud native transformation must go deeper.

🛑 Distributed Complexity

Managing services across private cloud, edge, and public cloud creates orchestration challenges. Real-time and asynchronous network functions must coexist—something telcos still struggle with operationally.

Why Cloud Native Still Matters

Despite the friction, the reasons to go cloud native haven’t changed. If anything, they’re more relevant than ever:

• Scalability for on-demand growth
• Agility for faster feature rollout
• Resilience for improved service continuity
• Efficiency to reduce infrastructure and operational costs
• Innovation via open APIs and open source ecosystems
• Multi-cloud flexibility and reduced vendor lock-in

Final Word

Philippe’s closing message was both grounded and optimistic. Yes, the journey is complex and sometimes slow—but cloud native is no longer a buzzword. It’s becoming the backbone of the telco techco transformation.

“The next few years will be about closing the gap—not just between CNFs and legacy systems, but between ambition and execution.”

A detailed article is available on Mobile Europe website here. The video of the conversation is embedded below:

Related Posts

• Operator Watch Blog: Orange Africa & Middle East (OMEA) to Reach Net Zero by 2040
• Operator Watch Blog: Energy and Carbon Footprint Reduction are a Priority for Orange
• The 3G4G Blog: What is Cloud Native and How is it Transforming the Networks?
• The 3G4G Blog: Transitioning from Cloud-native to Edge-Native Infrastructure
• The 3G4G Blog: Reigniting Growth in the Telecom Industry with AI and Cloud 

Orange Africa & Middle East (OMEA) to Reach Net Zero by 2040

Orange Africa and Middle East (OMEA) covers 17 countries containing 18,000 employees and 149 million customers. Every 3 out of 10 Africans are Orange customers. In 2023, OMEA generated €7 billion in revenue. Today, more than 90 million customers in 17 countries have opened an Orange Money account. While 2G & 3G is still extremely popular in Orange markets, 4G has been launched in 17 countries and is available to more than 60 millions customers.

Recently OMEA published "Seeds of change": Orange Africa and Middle East 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility Report. It's available here.

On their website detailing the reduction of carbon footprint, it says:

At Orange, the transition to renewable energies is a major priority. That’s why we’re launching numerous initiatives in Africa and the Middle East to help reduce our CO2eq emissions to reach our target of net zero by 2040. These include moving to solar to power our infrastructure, mini-grid solutions, and solar kits for companies and communities.

Orange Africa and Middle East publishes "Seeds of change", its 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Report, which illustrates our actions in the region. Reducing our energy consumption, developing our use of renewable energies and strengthening our transition to a circular economy are the pillars of our initiatives. We are constantly innovating with all stakeholders for a positive impact and for the benefit of individuals, society and the planet.

In Africa and the Middle East, where electricity is an essential issue, we resell surplus energy generated by our own solar farms to surrounding communities at an affordable price. This essentially converts our telecom equipment into mini grids (small solar farms), where consumption and payments can be controlled remotely.

We’re also developing various renewable energy projects that enable us along with Energy Service Company (ESCO) partners to equip our telecom towers with solar systems. Today, 10 Orange countries in the Africa and Middle East region are benefiting: Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Liberia, Madagascar, Senegal and Sierra Leone.

In Morocco and Tunisia, we’ve launched major solarization programs along with partners. We now produce 3.4 MWp of solar energy to supply data centers in seven of our countries in the region. More than 8,000 sites, or nearly 20% of our sites in Africa and the Middle East, are solarized.

We have also designed a range of services so that everyone can adapt their electricity to their needs and budget, such as our popular solar kit offer.

These programs, which are extending to other countries this year, reduce fuel consumption by up to 80%, depending on the site, powering our mobile phone infrastructure while avoiding more than 330,000 metric tons of CO2eq each year.

In Jordan, we’ve completely changed our electricity supply model and now use our own solar resources to the tune of 60 GWh. Commissioning three solar farms in 2019 generated enough power to cover 52% of Orange Jordan’s electricity needs in 2023 on a full-year basis. In terms of Jordan’s CO2eq emissions, this corresponds to 22,863 metric tons of CO2eq avoided in 2023 (scopes 1 & 2).

Our circular economy approach prioritizes mobile device collection and recycling, both of which require special treatment in countries where there’s a lack of national waste treatment, such as in Africa and the Middle East. Not only are we trying to extend the lifespan of electrical and electronic equipment, but we’re also aiming to collect 100% of the volume of electrical and electronic equipment waste from mobile phones sold in Africa and the Middle East by 2030.

We’ve partnered with the UN to introduce a circular economy for mobile and network equipment waste in Egypt, helping to develop local infrastructure and skills. E-waste in Egypt accounts for 20% of the total e-waste in Africa so the Egyptian government is looking at boosting its recycling rate by 25% by 2030 while ensuring the safe disposal of hazardous waste. The first mobile refurbishment center will launch in 2024 to help strengthen the skills of locally recruited technicians.

In the absence of efficient local recycling channels, the waste is collected and sent back to France to be recycled according to European environmental standards. Since 2010, Orange has partnered with the social cooperative organization Les Ateliers du bocage to open mobile waste collection workshops in three African countries (Burkina Faso, Cameroon and Côte d'Ivoire). These workshops have now dealt with more than 2 million mobile phones while creating job opportunities in the area.

You can learn more about OMEA in the video embedded below:

Related Posts: 

• Operator Watch Blog: Energy and Carbon Footprint Reduction are a Priority for Orange
• Operator Watch Blog - Africa: The Race For No. 2 Operator
• Operator Watch Blog: Orange Group presence worldwide 

Energy and Carbon Footprint Reduction are a Priority for Orange

At Huawei's Mobile Broadband Forum (#HWMBBF) 2022 in October, Emmanuel Chautard, SVP of Operations & Networks Economics at Orange Group presented their vision on transitioning 'Towards a Green, Software-based Telco'.

During his talk he mentioned that to fight global warming, Orange has identified three areas of concern:

1. The carbon footprint does not scale with traffic and there is no proportional relation between them
2. A major element source of greenhouse emissions is the customer device which can have a big impact on carbon footprint reduction.
3. Finally, ICT and softwarization can have a positive contribution to the overall carbon footprint impact for the society and for the other verticals and industries.

At #HWMBBF @orange SVP Emmanuel Chautard discusses cutting emissions and the importance of lengthening #smartphone lifecycles pic.twitter.com/noEofyBLHQ

— Mobile World Live (@mobileworldlive) October 26, 2022

Devices, on the other hand has a huge impact on carbon footprint reduction. An article on the group page highlights that it takes around 70kg of raw material to make a 120g smartphone (500 times its weight!). Raw material has to take four turns around the world before the phone arrives in our hands.

In his talk Emmanuel highlighted that Orange is reviewing how devices are one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. To support this fact he shared French regulator statistics showing that more than 75% of the carbon emissions are associated with the devices whereas the share for Network traffic is reduced to 6% for overall network and data centers consume 16% of the overall energy. Hence according to them, one quick win would be to increase the lifetime of the customer devices and focus on recycling.

The final area that we are touching in this post is Orange's transition towards software-based Telco. 

This softwarization, as can be seen in the picture above, is based on four pillars. The first being disaggregation, which is the fact that Orange plans to no longer implement black boxes within their networks as they have traditionally done. The journey towards identifying the software layer, the OS, and the infrastructure layer has started with the introduction to virtualization and deploying several Network functions on the same Cloud infrastructure. 

In addition, the softwarization journey continues further with Automation, AI and Machine Learning in order to support both the life-cycle management and the in-life management of the network. Introduction of software with APIs that are exposed Network APIs is expected to enable the on-demand network connectivity that their customers have started expecting.

Emmanuel also talked about the 100% software-enabled experimental network in Lannion, in the Britany department of France, which was announced in a press release back in June 2021 by Mavenir. The press release had noted that "This first phase of a two-year project is a key pillar in Orange’s preparations to transition towards more efficient and agile cloud-native zero-touch Open RAN networks."

I have seen a few vendors & operators now referring to 3GPP Release-17 as 5G-Advanced but the 3GPP definition is 5G-Advanced is Release-18. More details on this old blog post here - https://t.co/zY3thY3sAe pic.twitter.com/qO6d1YpO1e

— Zahid Ghadialy (@zahidtg) January 12, 2023

The talk of the video is embedded below:

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• Free 6G Training: New White Paper Outlines Orange's Vision for 6G
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Africa: The Race For No. 2 Operator

MTN is the largest mobile operator group in Africa with roughly 168 million subscribers, but who is number 2?

Airtel just crossed 100 millions subscribers in Africa and many news sites have started calling them the second largest operator group in the region. Livemint for example reported:

Bharti Airtel’s Africa arm has crossed the 100-million customer mark across its operations in the continent, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

This is significant for the company, which entered the continent in 2010. Airtel Africa is currently the second-largest mobile operator in Africa by the number of active subscribers; South Africa’s MTN is the largest.

Airtel Africa is the holding firm for Bharti Airtel’s operations in 14 countries in the continent across three regions — Nigeria; East Africa, comprising Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia; and the rest of Africa, including Niger, Gabon, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and Seychelles. Nigeria alone accounts for almost half of its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (Ebitda).

According to this Bloomberg article, back in July 2019, Airtel was the 4th largest by subs numbers.

• MTN 167.7 million 
• Orange 120 mil 
• Vodacom 110 mil 
• Airtel 98.9 mil

There is a small caveat though. While MTN does not include Middle East, Orange does. Again, Vodacom includes Safaricom in which it has around 35% stake. Vodafone, Vodacom’s parent (64.5% stake), had an additional 49.3 million customers in its operations in Egypt and Ghana at the end of June. If we include Vodafone, Vodacom and Safaricom, it would be going head-to-head with MTN for the top place.

The Guardian, Nigeria has a good summary of the top 4 mobile operators in Africa here.


Related Posts:

• Maroc Telecom's African Presence
• Lesotho: First 5G launch in Africa

Orange Group presence worldwide

The Orange group Integrated 2017 Annual Report highlights the reach and vision of the group. Along with the presence in 28 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa, it has 5 main business activities and 3 customer groups as can be seen in the picture below.

Some other key figures from the report:

• 152,000 employees
• Over 2 million B2B customers (professionals and SMEs, incl. 43,000 businesses with more than 50 employees) in France
• Over 3,000 customer multinationals outside France
• 273 million B2C customers
• Over 450 customer operators in France (wholesale)
• €7.2 billion investment in 2017
• 4.7 million customers with very high-speed (over 100 Mbit/s) broadband access
• 46 million 4G customers
• No. 1 FTTH operator in Europe (26.5 million fibreready households)
• 10.3 million B2C customers on convergent fixed and mobile deals

Palestine: 3G finally....

Picture Source: QZ

Palestinians in the West Bank were finally allowed high-speed 3G mobile data services at the beginning of this year. In world where fourth generation of mobile technology is available in even the most remote areas – from the peak of Mount Everest to the islands of the South China Sea – Israeli restrictions have until now forced Palestinians to settle for outdated second-generation technology. And their economy reflects it.

The only two Palestinian cellular providers Jawwal (owned by Palestine Telecommunications/PalTel)  and Wataniya Mobile (a subsidiary of Ooredoo) launched 3G mobile networks for customers in the Israeli-occupied territory at end of January 2018. Both these operators have to license their wireless spectrum from the Israeli government and route their traffic through Israel. And while Israel’s government granted 4G licenses to six Israeli mobile operators in 2015, Palestinians have remained stuck two generations behind.

Israel, where 3G networks went into service in 2004, had previously blocked Palestinian mobile companies' access to the necessary frequencies for nearly 12 years. In November 2015, it agreed to allow 3G in the West Bank alone and not in Gaza, however this was further delayed for unknown reasons.

Israel’s reasons for keeping Palestine on 2G up to now are not entirely known, however it is speculated that less-secure 2G networks are easier for the Israeli authorities to monitor—or at least to monitor without detection. They can eavesdrop (or potentially mass send everyone their own text messages, as evidenced in the Israeli assault of 2014) on traffic coming over Israeli companies' networks. 

To continue that level of surveillance on an upgraded 3G network run by Palestinian companies, Israel will have to either ensure that it can continue to tap into the network backbone those companies use, or use more detectable active surveillance technology like IMSI catchers. Active surveillance would be detectable: it would also be a violation of the Oslo accords, which declare that both sides “shall refrain from any action that interferes with the communication and broadcasting systems and infrastructures of the other side.”

But there could also be commercial reasons for delaying 3G. Palestinians often opine that one less visible economic aspect of Israeli occupation means that the 4 million strong Palestinian population living under Israeli control in the West Bank and Gaza is often used as a lucrative market for Israeli goods and services, to the detriment of Palestine’s own economy. One feature of Israel’s control is its stranglehold on the mobile market.

According to Ammar Al Aker, Palestine Telecommunication’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), the number of Israeli SIM cards (which are deemed illegal to sell or purchase in the West Bank and Gaza) have recently spiked. Al Aker said that before 2015, the number of Israeli SIM cards in the West Bank was estimated at 150,000, but in 2015 the number rose to 370,000 cards.Israeli SIM cards allow the residents of the West Bank to enjoy 3G coverage, whereas the Palestinian operators were restricted to 2G and effectively forced out of the market.

Israeli cellphone companies have extensive coverage in the West Bank, where they’ve been able to put cellphone towers in Israeli settlements—locations that, in the West Bank’s rugged topography, are prized because they’re typically on hilltops. As a result, they have better coverage in many places than Jawwal and Wataniya, as well as offering 3G or 4G:

Israel also keeps Jawwal and Wataniya in a chokehold in another way, by licensing far less spectrum to them than to Israeli firms. In the 2015 4G auction, Israeli companies bid on a total of 65 MHz of spectrum (on top of what they already had in 3G), to serve Israel’s population of 8 million people. Jawwal and Wataniya together have less than 10MHz, for a population slightly more than half that of Israel’s. Tight spectrum means slower connection speeds and more dropped calls.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that by one estimate, Israeli operators have 20%-40% of the Palestinian market, costing the Palestinian providers $80 million to $100 million a year in potential business. The World Bank, in a 2016 report, estimated that Palestinian cellular companies lost between $436 million (£308 million) and $1.5 billion in potential revenue in 2013 to 2015 due to Israeli restrictions on frequencies and equipment imports, and unauthorized competition by Israeli operators. 

And so there may well have been some pressure on the government to let the Israeli companies—which are also in such fierce competition with each other that not all of them are expected to survive—maintain their edge.

Israeli operators, which include Orange, Cellcom and Pelephone, provide telecoms services to illegal settlements within the West Bank, enabling them to offer coverage throughout the territory.

"As I speak to you in my office, I get coverage from all of the Israeli operators,” said Mr Aker. “We have to compete with Israeli operators, they cover West Bank with much more advanced technology.”

Jawwal is owned by the local Paltel Group and the leading provider in the Palestine Territories including Gaza with more than 2.5 million customers and a market share of more than 80%. In 1999, Israel licensed access to 4.8 MHz in the 900 MHz band to Jawwal, they still retain the same access, but for more than 2.5 million subscribers compared to only 120,000 in 1999.

Five gigabytes of data from Jawwal costs about $30, compared to $5 in Jordan and less than $4 in Israel. Many Palestinians will still use illegal Israeli 3G services because of the cheaper prices. However despite its elevated cost, Ammar Al Aker still believes that the 3G service will help “improve Palestinian citizens’ lives and develop the economy.” To this end, he confirmed that the Jawwal network is “powerful and widespread” and that in order to serve the largest number of users the company has installed 1,000 cellular towers in the West Bank.

Wataniya Mobile of the Kuwait-based and Qatar-owned Ooredoo Group. It started as the second mobile operator in 2009 in the West Bank. In 2017 it extended its area of operation to the Gaza Strip. Wataniya is now at the break-even point, but that it once suffered losses of as much as $20 million a year, it has only stayed afloat due to its main investors Ooredoo and the self-rule governments Palestinian Investment Fund.

The economy of the West Bank should significantly benefit from the new 3G services. Smaller Palestinian entrepreneurs also expect an immediate 3G bump in business.

For ordinary Palestinians, everyday life will get just a little easier.

Alaa Amouri, 20, a student, said she gets 4G from an Israeli provider that offers only partial coverage in the West Bank. Mobile data from a Palestinian provider would offer real-time updates on potential trouble on the roads, said Amouri, who commutes between east Jerusalem and her West Bank university, passing through the crowded Israeli-run Qalandiya crossing almost daily. It (3G) helps in getting news updates, she said. Sometimes when we are at the Qalandiya crossing, we find it blocked without knowing why.

However due to continuing security concerns, neither Palestinian operator is permitted by the Israeli government to extend their 3G coverage to the Gaza Strip. Considering the continued blockade it is unlikely this will change any time soon. 

Similarly 4G technology will probably not be deployed in Palestine until the rest of the world as moved onto 5G. 

As mentioned in this report Palestinians could consider initiatives at the local level without waiting for external actors. More specifically, each Palestinian municipality could make sure that areas under its control are well connected by ensuring the installation of fiber backbone and microwave links. Municipalities can also add solar power panels onto their street lighting poles as well as a wireless network to ensure citywide Wi-Fi. In addition, mesh wireless networks, which are not dependent on centrally-located towers and can bypass obstacles like hills, are a promising new avenue for municipalities. Indeed, local companies proposed a study for Ramallah modeled on Brazilian and US cities using street lighting poles but were not able to secure the funding. Such local-level projects should ideally be undertaken within a clear overall vision and strategy.

This is a complicated part of the world, ultimately political solutions are needed. However the status quo of technologically disadvantaging, and economically hindering Palestine is just another obstacle to peace.