Guinea eSIM Guide

Step by step

1. Check the country: Guinea is GN, +224, capital Conakry
2. Buy: a country plan if the whole trip is Guinea; a Hello Africa regional if you are crossing borders
3. Install on home WiFi: scan the QR code before you fly — installing needs internet, activating does not
4. Turn on data roaming for that line: a travel eSIM is technically roaming
5. Land at Conakry and let it register; if it asks, Orange with a country plan and Areeba with a regional

Bars but no data

• 1. Check that data roaming is ON for the eSIM line — it is the number one cause
• 2. Confirm the mobile data line is the eSIM and not your home SIM
• 3. Toggle airplane mode for 30 seconds
• 4. If you picked the network by hand, check which one: Orange with a country plan, Areeba with an Africa regional

It registered on the wrong network

• • Settings → Mobile Data → Network Selection, and turn off Automatic
• • Country plan: choose Orange (611-01). Africa regional: choose Areeba
• • Never choose Cellcom — no plan we sell works there
• • Put it back to Automatic once connected, so it re-attaches after a coverage gap

No signal outside the towns

• • In Guinea that is normal, not a fault in your eSIM
• • The plateau, the forest region and the parks are largely uncovered
• • Move to open ground or high ground and give it a minute to re-attach
• • If the whole network is down nationally, that may be a shutdown rather than coverage

Is this the country you want? Guinea, Guinea-Bissau or Equatorial Guinea

Three different countries, and people buy the wrong eSIM constantly. Guinea (code GN) is the French-speaking one on the Atlantic coast between Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone; its capital is Conakry and its dialling code is +224. Guinea-Bissau (GW) is the smaller Portuguese-speaking country to the north-west, capital Bissau, +245, and it has its own guide. Equatorial Guinea (GQ) is the Spanish-speaking country on the other side of the continent in the Gulf of Guinea, +240 — and we do not sell any plan that covers it, so if that is your destination, nothing on this page will help you. Papua New Guinea (+675) is in the Pacific and has nothing to do with any of them. Check the flag and the +224 before you pay.

What network does a Guinea eSIM actually connect to?

It depends which plan you buy, and the two answers are different. Every Guinea country plan in our catalogue declares exactly one operator: Orange, MCC-MNC 611-01, on 4G. An Africa regional package instead reaches Guinea on Areeba (the former MTN Guinea, state-owned since the end of 2024). So if your phone asks you to pick a network by hand, the right answer depends on what you bought: Orange with a country plan, Areeba with a regional. Pick the other one and you will sit there with full bars and no data. Cellcom, the third operator, is not in any of our plans at all.

Do you sell a Guinea country plan, or only regionals?

Both, and the country plans are the live ones. There are five: 1GB / 7 days, 2GB / 15 days, 3GB / 30 days, 5GB / 30 days and 10GB / 30 days. The pricing block on this page shows what they cost today. That 10GB / 30 days is the ceiling — there is nothing larger and nothing unlimited for Guinea from any provider we work with. Anyone advertising an unlimited Guinea eSIM is describing a fair-use policy, not an uncapped line.

Is there an eSIMfly Africa regional plan?

No, and it is worth being precise because plenty of guides get this wrong. Our own regional families are Europe, Europe Max, Central Asia, Asia, Oceania, North America, Latin America, Gulf and Balkans — Africa is not among them. The Africa regional packages you see on our site come from two partner catalogues, and only one of them reaches Guinea. Airalo Hello Africa lists 36 countries and Guinea is one of them. The eSIMaccess Africa package lists 29 countries and Guinea is not one of them, even though Guinea-Bissau is — which is exactly the kind of detail that is easy to misread. If your route chains countries, check them one by one rather than assuming "Africa" means the whole continent.

How good is coverage in the Fouta Djallon?

Town by town, not region-wide. Labé has usable service and Dalaba has basic connectivity, but the plateau between the towns, the trailheads and the waterfalls should be treated as no-signal. The same is true across most of Guinée Forestière and the national parks. Download offline maps, bookings and anything you will need before you leave Conakry or Labé, and plan the out-of-contact stretches deliberately instead of discovering them.

What speeds should I expect?

Our Guinea rows declare 4G, and 4G is genuinely available in Conakry and the larger cities. It thins out fast beyond them. We do not publish a megabits-per-second figure or a coverage percentage on this page, because we have no source for either that we consider reliable — the figures that circulate for Guinea trace back to a 2016 dataset. Budget for maps, messaging and email to work, and treat video calling as a bonus. Power cuts take cell sites down as well as offices, so a charged power bank matters as much as the bundle size.

Can the government switch the internet off?

It has done. NetBlocks documented social media restrictions in Guinea during political unrest from late November 2023, lifted in February 2024, and Access Now counted Guinea among the African countries with recorded internet shutdowns in 2024. There have also been reports of television channels being taken off air and radio frequencies jammed. An eSIM does not route around a national shutdown — it is the same mobile network. If your trip depends on being reachable, have a plan that does not rely on mobile data alone.

Is it safe to travel to Guinea right now?

Check your own government the week you fly, because this changes. As of the latest advisories we could verify: the US State Department has Guinea at Level 2, "Exercise Increased Caution", updated 25 February 2026, citing crime, civil unrest and inadequate health infrastructure, and notes that US government employees are barred from travelling between cities at night. The UK FCDO, updated 12 August 2026, warns that demonstrations can start with little or no notice and sometimes turn violent, and that opportunistic crime is common in Conakry. On the political side: Guinea had a coup on 5 September 2021, a constitutional referendum on 21 September 2025 that passed with 90.6% in favour, and a presidential election on 28 December 2025 won by Mamady Doumbouya with 86.72% of the vote, a result criticised by the opposition and the UN over the conduct of the election. Avoid demonstrations, do not photograph military or government installations, and register with your consulate.

What are the emergency numbers?

Guinea has no single national emergency number — there is no 911 equivalent. The two numbers that published sources agree on are 117 for the police and 118 for the gendarmerie. Other numbers circulate widely with conflicting service labels: 18 is listed as fire in some places and as ambulance in others, and 122 is often reprinted as a "general emergency" line when the sources that carry it describe it as the National Gendarmerie. We do not publish those here because we could not settle which service actually answers. In practice your hotel, your employer, your tour operator or your consulate will move help faster than a switchboard, and travel insurance with explicit medical evacuation cover is not optional in Guinea.

Do I need to register the eSIM?

SIM registration against an ID document is mandatory in Guinea and is overseen by the regulator, ARPT. That applies when you walk into a shop for a local prepaid line — you will need your passport. A travel eSIM is a roaming product on a partner network, so you are not registering anything yourself. If regulations change, that is handled upstream by the provider.

eSIM or a local SIM card?

For a trip of up to a few weeks the eSIM wins on convenience: you install and pay for it before you land, there is no shop visit or ID registration, and you do not lose your home number on a single-SIM phone. A local Orange or Areeba prepaid line is cheaper per gigabyte and gives you a +224 number, which matters if you are staying for months or if local contacts, drivers and site offices need to call you — and in Guinea a lot still happens by phone rather than email. Either way, carry cash: Guinea is a heavily cash-based economy and uses the Guinean franc (GNF), not the CFA franc that Guinea-Bissau and its other neighbours use.