Cosmote should be your first choice (about 48% market share and the strongest island coverage), followed by Vodafone (reliable in towns), with Nova trailing behind. In real-world tests, 4G typically delivers around 20–60 Mbps, while 5G reaches 100–300 Mbps. Coverage in popular areas is about ≈90%, but you can still lose signal on cliff edges or out at sea.
The Big Three
Cosmote
Standing on the 360-meter-high cliffs of Imerovigli, my phone stayed locked onto Cosmote with a steady 5G icon in the corner. One of its towers sits on a volcanic ridge along the road to Oia, and when I ran a speed test, latency came in at 28 ms with download speeds hitting 240 Mbps.
The island is filled with white cave-style hotels at different elevations, which can easily block high-frequency signals. Cosmote compensates by using low-band 800 MHz spectrum as its coverage layer, letting the signal bend around narrow lanes and reach places like the seafood restaurants at Ammoudi Port, 30 meters below Oia.
At noon on Paradise Beach in Mykonos, with the temperature at 34°C, more than 2,000 people were packed onto a 500-meter stretch of sand, all on their phones. Thanks to the extra spectrum capacity on its base stations, the network held up without noticeable slowdowns.
Real-world speeds at several popular spots:
- Little Venice waterfront: 180 Mbps down, 45 Mbps up
- Ano Mera inland: full 4G signal, reaching 70 Mbps
- Scorpios cliff bar: connected to 5G, with downloads over 300 Mbps
- Platis Gialos harbor: 22 ms latency, calls connect instantly
At 7:40 p.m., the Oia viewpoint was packed at roughly three people per square meter. The antennas behind the Byzantine castle ruins were overloaded, 5G dropped to 4G, and speeds fell to 15 Mbps. Sending a 5 MB original photo took about four seconds.
On a high-speed ferry to Mykonos traveling at 38 knots over a distance of 118 nautical miles, you can still catch signals from towers on 400-meter peaks on nearby islands as long as you sit by the window. About 15 nautical miles after leaving port, the sea opens up completely, the signal drops to two bars, and speeds fall to around 500 KB/s, though text messages still go through.
How the connection changes at sea:
- 5 nautical miles offshore: full 4G, smooth 1080p video streaming
- 10-20 nautical miles offshore: speeds drop to 5-8 Mbps, webpages load slowly
- In deep water between islands: connection cuts out and falls back to EDGE for about 15 minutes
- Approaching Naxos port: switches back to 5G and instantly jumps to 200 Mbps
If your eSIM connects to the wrong network, go into your phone settings and turn off automatic network selection. Wait about 40 seconds, then manually select Cosmote. It usually reconnects in around 15 seconds. If you have signal but no data, turn airplane mode on for five seconds and then off again so the tower can assign a fresh local IP address.
Vodafone
At 11 a.m., walking through the stone-paved streets in central Fira, Santorini, my phone connected to Vodafone. Shops lined both sides of the street, and rows of white square antennas were tucked away on rooftops. A speed test showed 250 Mbps with just 15 ms latency.
I rented a car and drove east to Kamari Beach. Walking along the 3-kilometer coastline, the screen consistently showed 4G+. Downloads reached 80 Mbps, and 320 kbps high-quality music streamed without a single hiccup the entire way.
Then I headed down the 300 steep steps to Ammoudi Port below Oia for dinner. Thick volcanic rock walls blocked the radio signal almost completely. The 5G icon flashed twice, dropped to 3G, and speeds fell to a miserable 2 Mbps.
Typical speeds in frequently visited areas:
- Fira central square: full 5G signal, over 200 Mbps
- Kamari open-air cinema: connected to 4G+, around 85 Mbps
- Imerovigli cliff path: around 45 Mbps, with occasional stutter
- Santorini airport terminal: full 5G coverage, 150 Mbps down
At 8 p.m. in the maze-like alleys of Mykonos Town, hundreds of whitewashed houses with blue roofs were packed tightly together. Vodafone uses Band 3 there, which has relatively strong wall penetration. Sitting inside a seafood restaurant with just one small window, I still measured 120 Mbps.
Riding an ATV down to Super Paradise Beach, I covered a 6-kilometer mountain road full of steep climbs and drops. Signals from the towers were constantly blocked by the surrounding hills. The signal bars on my phone mount kept bouncing between two and four bars, and maps loaded only with difficulty.
Driving all the way north to Agios Sostis Beach, there wasn’t a single visible tower for miles. The phone dropped to “No Service,” and speeds went to 0 Mbps. The only way back was by relying on offline maps I had downloaded earlier.
Speed tests from different points around Mykonos:
- Kato Mili windmills: stable 5G throughout, 180 Mbps down
- Car rental area outside the airport: 4G, holding around 60 Mbps
- Paradise Beach bar: 5G dropped to 30 Mbps when crowded
- New port ferry terminal: open-air 4G+, reaching 110 Mbps
On a regular ferry traveling at 20 knots to another island, Vodafone’s shore-based towers lose reach about 8 nautical miles after leaving Mykonos port. The signal disappears completely for a few minutes, then reconnects only when the ferry gets close to the next island’s coastline.
Many international eSIMs default to Vodafone on these islands. After scanning the QR code and activating the eSIM, it usually takes around 30 seconds for the phone to register with a local tower. If the phone has signal but no internet, the APN settings are often the problem.
At 8 p.m. in peak season, more than 15,000 tourists can be squeezed into a very small district. Thousands of phones compete for capacity on the same tower, and latency that normally sits around 15 ms can spike to 120 ms. Even a 10-second short video may buffer for several seconds.
Pull down the screen, switch on airplane mode, count to 10, then switch it off. The antenna will send a new registration request to the nearby tower. If you’re lucky, the phone may reconnect through a less crowded channel and give you a temporary speed boost of a few dozen megabits for messaging.
If your connection slows down while you’re out, here’s what to do:
- Turn off automatic network selection in your cellular settings
- Manually select Vodafone from the available networks
- Check the APN spelling against the eSIM email
- If the phone gets stuck on 3G, restart it completely
Nova (原 Wind)
At 2 p.m., my flight landed at Santorini’s JTR airport, where the tarmac was baking at 32°C. The moment I took out my phone, it picked up a Nova signal. A speed test showed 65 Mbps down with a stable 25 ms latency. The airport hall had four circular indoor antennas mounted overhead, and the connection felt smooth and easy to use.
Outside the terminal, while waiting for the KTEL shuttle bus, the 4G signal stayed at three bars. I downloaded a 120 MB island-wide bus timetable, and the progress bar moved steadily, finishing in 18 seconds. In a transport hub covering around 20,000 square meters, Nova’s tower density was clearly solid.
I rented a small car for €40 and drove 6 kilometers to Fira. On the main road, with roughly 500 tourists around, speeds started dropping and came in at 35 Mbps. Google Maps still worked fine, and even a restaurant review page with 20 high-resolution images loaded in about four seconds.
As long as you stay on the paved main roads or within busy commercial areas, this network is perfectly usable for around 2 GB a day of browsing and navigation.
Then I drove south to Red Beach, 8 kilometers away. Once outside town, towers became much rarer, and along a 5-kilometer stretch there wasn’t a single antenna in sight. The moment I stepped onto the dark red volcanic sand, the 4G icon in the corner of the screen dropped straight to EDGE.
I refreshed the page three times, but even a text-only news page of just 2 MB still hadn’t loaded after a full minute. Another 50 meters down toward the cliff by the shore, the phone showed “No Service.” The 30-meter-high terrain blocked what little signal remained.
The next day, I bought a €60 ferry ticket to Mykonos New Port. More than 300 people were crowded around the boarding gate, and the 4G network still managed 45 Mbps. The electronic ticket with the QR code loaded in under two seconds, and I boarded smoothly via the 15-meter gangway.
Real-world speed tests around Mykonos:
- JMK airport terminal: full 4G signal, 50 Mbps
- Ornos south beach: 20 Mbps, enough to load nine photos without lag
- Ftelia north bay: often drops to 3G, with one outage about every 30 minutes
- Ano Mera town center: down to two bars, uploads stuck at 8 Mbps
Inside the lanes of Mykonos Town (Chora), dense two-story white buildings are packed tightly together. High-band frequencies do not penetrate well, and sitting in a café behind two 30-centimeter brick walls, I only got 12 Mbps. Sending a 15-second voice message took four seconds just to start uploading.
I rented a 125cc scooter and headed north to remote Fokos Beach. After passing Ano Mera village, the asphalt gave way to 4 kilometers of rough dirt road. Out in this scrub-covered wilderness, there wasn’t even a half-meter micro-antenna anywhere in sight.
The phone kept searching frantically for a network, and its RF components were working at full load. On a drive of just 40 minutes, the battery dropped an unexpected 8%. At five unsigned dirt-road junctions, the map simply refused to load, leaving me guessing my way through 30°C heat.
When your phone stays in a weak-signal area for too long, it burns through battery searching for a connection. Before heading to remote beaches, make sure your battery is above 80% and save offline maps in advance.
Back in Santorini, I went to Oia for sunset. At 7 p.m., more than 10,000 tourists were packed into a 1-square-kilometer area around the viewpoint. Nova had the fewest towers of the three carriers, and its network capacity—roughly enough for 2,000 users—was immediately overwhelmed.
I tried sending a 10-second, 20 MB sunset video to a friend, but the screen showed the red failed-to-send icon three times in a row. Latency climbed to 400 ms, and long-distance voice calls sounded broken and robotic.
Many cheap eSIMs sold for just $10 are locked to this network. If you open your cellular settings and the APN field says “internet.wind,” the phone is effectively stuck on Nova and cannot switch to another carrier.
When speeds get stuck at 0.5 Mbps and go nowhere, pull down Control Center and turn on airplane mode. Wait eight seconds, then turn it off to force the phone to re-register with the tower. If you’re lucky, it may reconnect through a less congested band and temporarily recover to around 5 Mbps.
Emergency fixes when the network is unusably slow:
- In crowded areas, manually switch to 3G for more reliable text-only messaging
- Before leaving hotel Wi-Fi, download offline maps for a 15-kilometer radius
- Save files over 50 MB for later and upload them when you’re back in town on 4G
Santorini
Cliff Towns (Oia / Fira)
On the 2.5-kilometer cliff path from Fira to Imerovigli, your phone antenna is dealing with a genuine physical challenge. The trail sits at roughly 260 meters above sea level, with a volcanic caldera dropping more than 300 meters on one side and tightly stacked white buildings on the other. Local regulations in Santorini prohibit exposed telecom towers along the cliff edge, so base station antennas are usually hidden behind churches about 100 meters away.
Cosmote has deployed three micro base stations around the Fira cable car station, ensuring strong coverage within an 800-meter radius. Real-world tests show 5G download speeds staying above 120 Mbps in open-air areas along the main pedestrian street. But once you step into the narrow side alleys, stone walls start blocking the signal and speeds immediately drop by around 40%.
- Fira main commercial street: full 5G signal, latency under 25 ms
- Oia castle ruins: more than 10,000 simultaneous connections at sunset, speeds dropping to 5 Mbps
- Imerovigli high point: clear line of sight to the signal source, upload speeds around 40 Mbps
Every evening around 7:00 p.m., roughly 8,000 to 10,000 visitors gather at Oia’s sunset viewpoint, an area of just 0.15 square kilometers. Massive numbers of photo and short-video uploads instantly consume available bandwidth, pushing the base stations to their capacity limits. At that point, sending a single 4 MB original photo can take 90 seconds, and packet loss spikes even if the phone still shows 5G.
Santorini’s iconic cave hotels are the natural enemy of mobile signal. These rooms are carved directly into volcanic rock, with walls typically 60 to 100 centimeters thick. The metal-rich minerals in the rock absorb radio waves extremely effectively.
Tests show that 3.5 GHz high-band 5G cannot penetrate the wooden doors of cave rooms at all. Even the more penetrative 800 MHz low band fails completely about three meters inside. The phone goes straight from 5G to “No Service.”
- Inside the bedroom: 0% mobile connectivity, hotel Wi-Fi is essential
- Private plunge pool area: semi-open layout gives 1-2 bars, enough only for text messages
- Under the terrace umbrella: with the overhead slab no longer blocking the signal, speeds can recover to 30 Mbps
On Nikolaou Nomikou, Oia’s famous marble pedestrian street, connectivity is smoothest thanks to dense deployment of Bande 3 (1800 MHz) antennas. But the moment you leave this main corridor and walk down the steps toward the cliff, signal strength decays exponentially with every 10 meters of descent.
By the time you reach the restaurants midway down the cliff, the base station signal is fully blocked by the buildings above because of the steep angle. The phone then tries to latch onto weak reflected signals bouncing off the volcanic island across the caldera. That is enough for basic text messaging, but not for video calls.
- Download maps on the marble main street before heading farther
- Upload high-resolution video outside peak crowd hours
- Switch to Wi-Fi as soon as you check into your room
- Prepare an offline backup communication plan for lower cliff areas
Beach Areas (Kamari / Perissa)
Drive 15 minutes east from the caldera on the west coast and the terrain drops to sea level. Kamari and Perissa stretch along 5 kilometers of black volcanic beach. Here, there are no thick volcanic rock walls blocking radio waves, and the towers are installed on open ground across the plain or at the foot of Mesa Vouno.
Signals from the antennas travel cleanly across the beach and sea-level terrain. Cosmote has two high-power base stations covering 2 kilometers each along the southern and central sections of Kamari’s beachfront road. Walking the flat promenade, the phone consistently shows full 5G bars.
Download speeds above 250 Mbps are easy to achieve. Even Nova, with fewer towers, can still deliver 40 to 60 Mbps here. On the beach, an eSIM gets signal from almost any angle you hold the phone.
- Front-row sunbeds: completely unobstructed line of sight, with some of the fastest speeds on the island
- Open-air seafood restaurant strip: regular canvas shade structures do not interfere with the signal
- Inland within 500 meters of the sea: signal weakens only slightly after passing through a row of low buildings
- At the foot of the mountain between the two towns: Mesa Vouno can cause a brief two-second fluctuation
Because the terrain is flat and there are no stone walls to block the signal, speed is mainly determined by how crowded the beach is. Every July and August, from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., more than 3,000 loungers fill a 2-kilometer stretch of beach. Thousands of phones are uploading photos and streaming music through the same towers at the same time.
The pressure on tower capacity rises instantly. A speed test showing 280 Mbps at 9 a.m. may drop to around 80 Mbps by 3 p.m. when the beach is busiest. Vodafone’s towers have less capacity, and afternoon latency can rise from 18 ms in the morning to 45 ms.
Uploading a 30-second video of the waves can take an extra seven or eight seconds to finish. Farther south, beyond the mountain at Perissa, the coastline is wider and tourist density is lower. Tower coverage is spread over a longer area, and there is much less congestion from too many devices competing in the same spot. Across the major roaming networks, all-day connectivity remains above 99%.
- 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.: fewer devices on the towers, ideal for backing up high-resolution photos to the cloud
- Under the afternoon sun: phones are prone to overheating and throttling, which slows browsing
- After the evening crowd thins out: transmission channels free up and speeds return to 150 Mbps+
- Cooler nighttime hours: phone chips run at full speed, giving very low gaming latency
Boat Trips (Catamaran / Ammoudi Bay)
Follow the 2-meter-wide stone staircase down the west side of Oia, and with every ten steps, your signal drops another notch. By the time you reach the 300th step and arrive at the red-earth flat by Ammoudi Bay, you have a 200-meter cliff rising behind you. The thick volcanic rock acts like a giant wall, completely blocking the island’s signal. Your phone starts searching for the faint signal drifting over from a base station on Therasia, 1.5 kilometers away. In this harbor known for fresh octopus, speed tests come in below 3 Mbps.
- First 50 steps down: 5G drops back to 4G, webpages take three seconds longer to load
- At around step 150: speeds fall below 8 Mbps, image uploads keep spinning
- At the bottom around step 300: connection drops to 3G and frequently loses service
- At the outermost seaside tables: with no obstructions, you may catch two bars for text messaging
Most eSIMs often lose connectivity here. If you try posting a geotagged update while eating grilled fish, a 15 MB image may stall at 99% for two full minutes. Cosmote’s 800 MHz low-band antenna on the island across the water becomes your only real lifeline. Move your phone to the edge of the table with a clear view, and you may occasionally pick up two bars of HSPA+. Once you board a catamaran carrying up to 50 passengers and head into the caldera, the obstacle is no longer rock but open water.
The sea surface creates mirror-like reflections that can cancel out the direct radio signal. Once the catamaran is 3 kilometers offshore in deeper water, all carriers suffer a sharp drop in performance. When the boat stops near the sulfur hot springs off Nea Kameni, about 5 kilometers from the nearest land tower, the already weak few-megabit connection is further weakened by distance and shared with more than 400 tourists on a dozen nearby boats.
| Water Along the Route | Measured Distance from Shore | Network Status | Average Download Speed | Latency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Just outside Ammoudi Port | 500 m | Barely holding onto 4G | 12 Mbps | 65 ms |
| Near Nea Kameni | 5.2 km | Drops to 3G or EDGE | 1.5 Mbps | 185 ms |
| Near Palia Kameni | 6.8 km | Highly unstable, frequent dropouts | Speed test failed | Timed out |
| Offshore from Red Beach | 1.1 km | Stable 4G signal restored | 38 Mbps | 42 ms |
Signal loss at sea exposes the real strength of each carrier’s network. Vodafone cannot hold a connection past the second volcanic island, and the phone keeps flashing “No Service.” Nova becomes unusable about 15 minutes after departure. On phones roaming on the top carrier, WhatsApp messages may still trickle through intermittently, but streaming a 1080p live video from the moving deck is simply not realistic.
- Bow net area: best reception, since it avoids the metal structure of the cabin
- Sulfur hot spring entry point: once people get in the water, phones are especially likely to lose signal
- Stern engine area: engine vibration plus structural obstruction makes the network extremely unstable
- Near the southern White Beach: once back within range of shore-based towers, speeds recover to 30 Mbps
Mykonos
Mykonos Town
Walk into Matoyianni, the main shopping street, and the chalk-white stone path narrows to just 1.5 meters across. The surrounding buildings still follow their original 15th-century anti-pirate layout, with walls built from volcanic ash and fieldstone, measuring a hefty 70 to 85 centimeters thick.
Out in the open, a phone on Cosmote can receive an excellent -65 dBm signal. But the moment you step into a jewelry shop, that can drop to a very weak -115 dBm. A 3.5 GHz 5G signal simply cannot penetrate walls of solid stone this thick.
The phone has no choice but to fall back to Band 20 (800 MHz) and struggle along on low-band coverage. Signal bars rise and fall constantly as you move through the alleyways.
Places where connection loss is especially common:
- The dead-end lane behind Agia Kyriaki Church on Zanni Pitaraki
- The semi-basement taverns near the Tria Pigadia wells
- Fitting rooms inside boutiques on Enoplon Dinameon Street
- The narrow passage on the north side of Panagia Paraportiani Church
Between 7:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m., more than 4,500 tourists crowd into the 400-meter pedestrian zone around the old port. At Boni windmill hill, speeds measured 145 Mbps at 9:00 a.m., but by 8:00 p.m. they had dropped to just 12 Mbps.
In the stone maze, phones constantly search for a usable signal, which drains battery fast. Walking around town for two hours with an iPhone 15 Pro uses 22% more battery than spending the same time on the beach.
To punch through thick masonry, the phone’s internal chip pushes transmission power up to 23 dBm. In summer heat at 36°C, combined with the RF chip running at full load, the back of the phone can easily exceed 41°C.
Once thermal protection kicks in, screen brightness is forced down to 30%. It only returns to normal after you leave the dead zone and the chip cools off. Finding the right open-air spot can save a lot of battery.
Open spots with consistently strong signal:
- Beside the marble statue in the center of Manto Mavrogenous Square
- The upper waiting steps at the southern Fabrika bus terminal
- The open courtyard of the Maritime Museum
- The open stretch along Gialos waterfront near the town hall
Walk toward Little Venice (Alefkandra), where the restaurants face the Aegean, and the signal tower on high ground 2.5 kilometers away has a perfectly clear line of sight. Phones there can lock steadily onto Band 7 (2600 MHz).
Even with salt-laden Meltemi winds blowing at 35 knots, speed tests here stay between 85 and 105 Mbps. Vodafone has installed micro base stations on 4-meter wooden utility poles near the windmills.
But when you turn a 90-degree corner that is only 1.2 meters wide, tower handoff can stutter. Packets may be lost for 3 to 5 seconds, causing WhatsApp voice calls to sound robotic or drop entirely.
Nova has only two macro towers covering the entire Chora basin. At 8 p.m. in Kounelas fish restaurant, downloading a 5.2 MB PDF menu on Nova can take 55 seconds.
The two- and three-story stone houses also throw off GPS accuracy by several dozen meters. A location fix that should be accurate to 15 meters can be pushed beyond 65 meters by signal reflections off stone walls. The blue dot in Google Maps may jump between three or four different streets.
Ways to improve both connectivity and positioning:
- Step about 2.5 meters out of the shop and into an open area
- Force the phone to stay on LTE (4G) in settings
- Download Mykonos offline maps in advance, about 45 MB for the full island
- Turn on Wi-Fi so the phone can scan up to 120 nearby shop routers per minute for better positioning
Beach Clubs
Drive along the southern coast, where the slope reaches 22 degrees, and park near Paradise Beach or Paraga Beach. In peak season during July and August, the 400-meter crescent of sand is packed wall-to-wall with canvas sun loungers.
By 4 p.m., thousands of people flood into top beach clubs like Scorpios and Nammos. The Cosmote base station built on the dunes near the shore was originally designed to handle around 800 devices. At that point, it is trying to serve requests from 4,500 phones.
The beach is simply too crowded. A cheap roaming eSIM with 4G only, even if it cost €15, can be heavily deprioritized during the busiest afternoon hours.
Your phone may still show full signal bars, yet uploading a 3.2 MB photo to Instagram can stall for a full two minutes. The speed test needle crawls upward, with download speeds falling from 120 Mbps at 10 a.m. to just 1.5 Mbps, while latency climbs to 185 ms.
Switch to an eSIM plan with 5G priority, and the experience changes completely. The phone can connect to the 3.5 GHz N78 band, avoiding the heavily congested Band 3 and Band 20 layers used by the biggest crowds.
Standing next to the bar, a speed test on 5G can still return 25 to 35 Mbps. Uploading a 12-second, 40 MB DJ video to WhatsApp takes about 15 seconds from start to finish.
Spots where the connection tends to fail:
- The dance floor between two massive bass speakers
- The innermost seats in VIP sections with thick dried-reed roofing overhead
- The semi-underground restrooms at the back of the club, lower than beach level
- The rocky area more than 10 meters out by the water, far from the main building
- The second row of loungers, where umbrellas are tightly packed and crowds are densest
With outside temperatures at 35°C, the phone is constantly sending handshake requests to the tower under direct sun. The RF chip on the motherboard runs at full load, and an iPhone 15 Pro can exceed 42°C in just ten minutes.
Once overheating protection kicks in, the screen suddenly dims and the system forces the cellular module to reduce transmit power. Even a plain text iMessage may fail to send, and the phone in your hand starts to feel like a hot piece of metal.
A real-world set of speed test results recorded at 5 p.m. on Super Paradise Beach:
| Transporteur | Plan Network Priority | Download (Mbps) | Upload (Mbps) | Latency (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cosmote | 5G local priority | 32.5 | 8.2 | 45 |
| Cosmote | 4G roaming restricted | 2.1 | 0.4 | 185 |
| Vodafone | 4G/5G auto | 1.8 | 0.2 | 210 |
| Nova | basic 4G access | 0.5 | 0.1 | 240 |
Vodafone’s tower sits on an arid hillside 1.5 kilometers away. Rows of metal umbrellas on the beach, plus dense human bodies, cut the radio signal by more than half. Nova has only a handful of antennas along the south coast, and at peak hours it can struggle to refresh even the WhatsApp chat list.
Club operators know mobile service is unreliable, so they install Ubiquiti Wi-Fi access points above the bar and VIP areas. Each suspended white disc has its own fiber line, but each unit is still shared by around 200 people.
Guests paying €2,000 for a front-row cabana receive a printed card with a dedicated Wi-Fi password on the table. The free network at the regular bar is shared by thousands of people, and even the browser login page can keep spinning for five minutes without loading.
Five ways to recover your phone signal:
- Walk 50 meters away from the crowd toward the open parking area behind the club
- Keep the phone under a white dry towel to reduce heat buildup
- Temporarily disable all background app refresh
- Screenshot and save your driver’s phone number before the evening rush
- Manually switch network mode from 5G Auto to forced 4G LTE
Farther north at Panormos Beach, the situation is a little different. Principote occupies an entire bay, and the surrounding rocky hills block stray signals from outside the area.
Cosmote has stationed a mobile Cell on Wheels (COW) in the staff parking lot. A 15-meter antenna faces directly toward the beach, filling in what would otherwise be a dead zone in this remote bay.
At 3 p.m., lying on a sunbed at Principote, I ran a speed test and got 145 Mbps download. A few high-resolution Live Photos sent to the family group chat were delivered in three seconds.
Once the sun drops below the horizon and people start leaving for dinner around 8:30 p.m., the number of active connections on the tower falls from about 4,500 to roughly 500.
At 9 p.m., testing again from an almost empty lounger on Paradise Beach, download speeds were back up to 110 Mbps. I opened a Netflix movie in 1080p, and the buffer bar filled the next ten minutes of playback in just two seconds.