Turkey’s mobile (cell) phone companies are Turkcell (900 Mhz, the largest), Vodaphone (900 Mhz, next largest), and Türk Telekom (1800 Mhz, formerly Avea).
All of them also offer 2G GPRS/EDGE, 3G (W-CDMA, 2100 Mhz) service, and 4G LTE (called 4.5G LTE).
Turkcell
Turkcell‘s coverage is the best in Turkey, pretty much everywhere, except for occasional relatively small dead spots in a few remote and/or mountainous areas in the eastern region of the country. Turkcell offers a bewildering variety of usage packages, so consider the amounts of voice minutes, SMS text messages, and Internet Megabytes or Gigabytes you may require before you go to the shop, then ask a clerk for a package that fits your needs.
Vodaphone
Vodaphone, with 22% of the mobile phone customers in Turkey, has fairly good coverage in towns and cities larger than 10,000 population, but the least complete coverage of the three companies. It offers a good Holiday Plan for foreign visitors. More…
Türk Telekom
Türk Telekom, with 17% of Turkey’s mobile phone customers, has extensive coverage of the country. You probably won’t find significant areas in your travels that have no service. TT offers some of the least expensive roaming plans for foreign visitors. More…
Coverage
Here’s a coverage map showing Turkcell‘s coverage; note the few white spots (no coverage) in remote areas of the east:
Company Websites
Although the Turkcell website has an English-language sectionabout roaming with Turkcell, it is minimally useful. Türk Telekom is better, but still lacking. Tthe Vodaphone website has decent information on its roaming and visitor-SIM services.
Among the easiest solutions to the communications problem is a Mobile Wifi Hotspot:
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