Phuket: solid on the main island, gone the moment you sail

On the main island, it is fine

Signal on Phuket proper is good to excellent through Patong, Karon, Kata, Kamala and the tourist strip. Phuket town and Ao Bang Thao are good. The remote west coast beaches are variable, which is the only part of the island worth a second thought.

If your holiday is a resort, a few beaches and a night market, nothing on this page changes what you buy. Go by price on the Thailand hub and stop reading here.

The rest of this page is for people getting on boats.

The crossings have no signal at all

Phuket is the hub for Andaman Sea island-hopping — Phi Phi, the Similans, the Racha Islands and the Krabi coastline all leave from its piers. Every ferry between Phuket and Phi Phi, every speedboat to the Similans, every long-tail to a remote beach loses connectivity mid-crossing. That is expected, it is not a fault, and no plan you buy will change it.

The consequence is not the journey. It is everything you were going to arrange during the journey:

• Boat schedules change with the weather, so confirm the return before you sail out.
• Restaurants on Phi Phi want reservations on busy days.
• Island navigation needs a downloaded offline map, on the phone, before you leave.

Do all of it from the hotel in Phuket, on wifi or on a full signal, rather than assuming you will have a bar of 4G somewhere off Ko Yao.

What you get once you land on the islands

That AIS note is about the Thai carrier's own footprint, not about any travel eSIM. Which brings us to the correction worth making.

You cannot buy an "AIS eSIM" here

A lot of Phuket advice, including the earlier version of this page, told readers that AIS is essential for island coverage and then named which travel eSIMs supposedly run on it. We cannot support any of that. None of the providers we track — Saily, Airalo, eSIM Go, Nomad, eSIMCard — publish a host network for Thailand. Not one. Airalo's Thai plan is sold under the name Maew, which is a retail product name and not a carrier.

So the practical position is this. If reaching Phi Phi's outer beaches or a Similan anchorage with a working phone genuinely matters to you, the only way to deliberately choose AIS is a local prepaid SIM from a carrier shop or the airport counter, where you know whose network you are on. About $10 at the airport in our data, passport required to register.

If it does not matter that much — and for most island-hopping trips it does not, because you should be running offline anyway — buy the cheapest eSIM that covers your days and put the effort into the offline maps instead.

Prices

Read from the providers' own sites on 13 August 2026:

A week of island-hopping is a light data week in practice, because you spend chunks of it disconnected. Airalo's 5 GB over 7 days at $7.00 covers a typical trip. Heavy use at a beach resort — streaming, hotspotting a laptop — is where the bigger plans earn their place, and it is worth noting that Airalo's 50 GB at $27.50 is the cheapest gigabyte in the Thai data at $0.55, less than a fifth of the 1 GB starter's rate. Airalo also lists unlimited over 7 days at $21.50, verified.