Delhi: strong above ground, patchy in the older tunnels

The Metro is where you will notice a difference

The Delhi Metro is one of Asia's best systems — 390 stations across 13 lines, and entirely navigable with the DMRC app and Google Maps. It is also the one part of the city where your connection is not dependable.

Signal in the tunnels is available on the major lines, which tend to be the newer sections, and absent on some of the older underground stretches. There is no neat rule for which is which, so the practical approach is to load your route before you go down the stairs rather than while you are between stations. If you are relying on the DMRC app for fares or interchange guidance, have it open before you tap in.

That is genuinely different from the rest of India, where the constraint is usually rural coverage rather than tunnels.

Old Delhi rewards an offline map

Old Delhi — Chandni Chowk, the area around Jama Masjid — has signal on the main streets. The congested lanes behind them are another matter: they are hard to navigate at the best of times, and signal there is intermittent.

Download offline maps for that specific area before you go in. Not for Delhi as a whole, which is well covered, but for the few square kilometres where a stalled map and a wrong turn compound each other.

Air quality is a live-data problem

Delhi's air quality is frequently in the 150 to 300-plus AQI band. Real-time air quality apps — IQAir, AirVisual — are practically useful here in a way they are not in most cities, and "real-time" is the operative word. This is one of the few genuine arguments for keeping a data connection running all day in Delhi rather than dipping in and out on hotel wifi.

Getting around, and paying the right fare

Uber and Ola are the standard and both work across the city. Auto-rickshaws still require negotiation, and having a ride-hailing quote on the screen is the simplest way to know what the trip should cost before you start haggling. Zomato and Swiggy handle food delivery to essentially any hotel.

IGI Airport connects Delhi to virtually everywhere in the country, so for a lot of visitors this is the first place a connection has to work — which is the argument for arriving with an eSIM already installed rather than joining a SIM counter queue after a long flight.

What it costs

India is not a cheap eSIM market, which sits oddly beside how cheap Indian mobile data is domestically. These Airalo prices were read from the provider's own site on 13 August 2026:

Nomad's verified 50 GB month at $43 sits above that ladder at 86 cents a gigabyte, the cheapest in the country; an earlier version of this page said the market topped out at 20 GB, and it does not. Cheaper entry prices exist. Saily's 1 GB over 7 days at $3.99 was read from Saily's own site on 16 August 2026, and buys a week where Airalo's $4 buys three days. Below that sit Nomad's verified $4 for 1 GB over 7 days.

On networks, be careful what you believe. Airalo publishes no host network for India at all — its plan is sold under the product name Indicomm, which is a retail label rather than a carrier. Saily publishes none either, offering a connection from India's best networks without saying whose. Nomad publishes none either — an earlier version of this page said it listed Airtel and Jio, and that was wrong. Holafly publishes none either. eSIMCard lists Airtel and Jio in its own materials, but that has not been confirmed by us and we would not pick a plan on the strength of it.

A local Indian SIM is around $7 at the airport in our data, from Reliance Jio, Airtel, Vi or BSNL, and needs a passport and ID to register. On price alone that beats every eSIM on this page, and it is the honest recommendation for a longer stay. What the eSIM buys you is skipping the registration process entirely and landing at IGI with data already working.

Full country pricing is on the India hub.