Internet in Sicily: real speeds, what we know and what we don't

Search for internet speeds in Sicily and you get two stories that can't both be true. Nomads.com says Palermo averages 18 Mbps and calls it "Slow". A coworking in Catania publishes a speed test of 2.1 Gbps. The gap is a factor of more than a hundred, and both numbers are real. They just measure different things.

I spend a fair part of my working life comparing connections, so this article sorts the numbers by what they are: measured, advertised, crowd-sourced or unsourced. Then it covers what nobody has measured yet, what a SIM costs per gigabyte, and the test I run before renting anything. For the full reference (fibre plans, every operator, eSIM, Starlink) see our internet chapter in the practical guide. The two pieces use the same figures.

The numbers, sorted by how much to trust them

Two rows deserve a closer look. BeetCommunity appears twice, at 411.79 Mbps on its own FAQ and at 93/91 Mbps on a directory. Same company, a fourfold difference. A listing tells you what someone measured once, on some device, in some room; it does not tell you the line's capacity. The other row is Nomads.com. Its averages come from users' tests, often on café or holiday-flat Wi-Fi, which is exactly where Sicilian connections are weakest. Siracusa has no Nomads.com city page at all: nomads.com/syracuse is Syracuse, New York. The national row now comes from Ookla's own page. It replaces figures I had quoted second-hand from nomad.watch (fixed 285.86, mobile 135.91 Mbps): Ookla's page shows that second set too, but by the ranks it gives they aren't Italy's.

On mobile coverage, the one figure I found for a Sicilian city comes from Il Sole 24 Ore (May 2025): 5G covers 97% of Palermo's urban population. That is the article's number; I have not seen the underlying data.

The national fibre picture

Italy builds fibre on two tracks: private operators where it pays, state money in the aree bianche (white areas) where it doesn't. The facts I could verify:

• Open Fiber, data at 30 September 2026: 4.549 million customers, FTTH (fibre to the home) for sale in 6,462 municipalities, 169,060 km of network. In the PNRR-funded Piano Italia 1 Giga it reports 1.284 million addresses connected in FTTH and 231,000 in FWA (fixed wireless).
• FiberCop won 7 of the 15 Italia 1 Giga lots, about 3 million of roughly 6.8 million addresses. Sicily is not among them: the Sicilian lot (lot 8) went to Open Fiber when the tender was awarded in May 2022, according to CorCom.
• The plan's target is at least 1 Gbit/s down and 200 Mbit/s up.
• The older Piano Banda Ultralarga reported, at 31 October 2025, 5,144 municipalities nationally with FTTH testing passed, plus 212 with prescriptions. No Sicilian breakdown.

What we don't know

This list matters as much as the table above.

• FTTH coverage per city. Not published in readable form for Palermo, Catania or Siracusa. The official map is an image; coverage is checked address by address.
• City speed medians. Ookla has no Sicilian city pages (the Palermo, Catania and Siracusa addresses redirect to the national one), and I haven't tried nPerf. Nobody I've read has a sourced Sicilian median.
• Starlink's official Italian price. The official page didn't render for us. Press reports (SmartWorld, May 2026) put the residential plans at €35, €45 and €65 a month after an increase; check the availability map and the price yourself.
• WindTre prices and Vodafone's resident plans. Not verified. Vodafone's tourist plans are in the SIM table below.
• Summer power cuts. No sourced data either way.

Anyone who gives you a percentage of FTTH homes in Siracusa is either holding data I couldn't find, or guessing.

SIM cards: price per gigabyte

Prices seen on the operators' official pages on 4 November 2026, all with unlimited minutes. The last column is my own arithmetic, to make offers comparable.

Very also sells unlimited data at €14.99, and its prices differ if you port a number from another operator. One-off costs: iliad charges €9.99 for activation; ho. Mobile from €2.99 for customers of some operators, otherwise for example €29.90; TIM's online SIM costs €10 (€5 credit plus €5 SIM), activation free online for new customers. I did not record an activation fee for Very. Vodafone's Dolce Vita tourist plans are the dearest per gigabyte here, but they're the only ones sold explicitly to people with a foreign tax code, which helps in your first days without a codice fiscale; I didn't capture their renewal terms.

Cheapest per gigabyte is not automatically best. The ho. yellow-badge plans cap speed at 60 Mbps, fine for calls, slow for uploading a 4 GB video file.

The ID rule

Italian operators must identify every SIM buyer. ho. Mobile's official guide is the clearest page I found: an identity document (it accepts carta d'identità, passport, driving licence or permesso di soggiorno) plus your codice fiscale, the Italian tax code. Only adults can buy a SIM; a SIM delivered to your home is activated by video-selfie identification in the ho. app or with SPID. I couldn't read iliad's or Very's rules, so treat ho.'s as a guide and bring your passport and codice fiscale to the shop. No codice fiscale yet? Our chapter on codice fiscale, bank and healthcare explains how to get one; until then, an EU SIM roams at domestic prices with fair-use limits.

My test-before-you-rent protocol

This is the routine I use, in order. It takes about twenty minutes at a viewing.

1. Ask the technology, by name. FTTH (fibre to the flat), FTTC (fibre to the street cabinet, copper to the flat) or FWA (wireless). "Fibra" in a listing can mean any of the three.
2. Check the address yourself on Open Fiber's coverage checker and the FiberCop map. Both work by street and house number.
3. Ask for a recent screenshot of a speed test on the flat's own line, with upload and ping visible. Upload is what video calls and backups depend on.
4. Run your own test in the room where you'll work, on Wi-Fi, and on a cable if there is one. Then compare with the table above: a result nearer the crowd-sourced averages than the coworking figures is a reason to ask more questions.
5. Walk the router's signal. Thick stone walls in old centres can kill Wi-Fi one room away. A cable or a mesh unit often fixes more than a faster contract.
6. Test mobile signal indoors, on your SIM and if possible on a second network, in case you need to tether.
7. Ask who holds the contract and whether it's included in the rent. Opening a new line takes time; in the first weeks a 5G router may be quicker.
8. Get the answers in writing, especially for short lets booked from abroad: router model, technology, a screenshot.

The housing chapter covers the rest of the viewing.

A backup setup that costs little

Remote work groups learn this the expensive way. Euronews reported in March 2023 that the Remote 9 road trip round Sicily travelled with three routers because of poor Wi-Fi. You don't need three. You need layers that don't fail together.

Plus one habit that costs nothing: keep offline copies of whatever you need for the next working day. I keep a second SIM on a network different from my home line's, and it has paid for itself more than once.

Checklist

• Read crowd-sourced averages as a description of café Wi-Fi, not of fibre.
• Get a codice fiscale before buying a SIM.
• Pick a SIM on a different network from your landlord's line.
• Run the eight-step test at every viewing.
• Save one coworking day pass in your phone for the first week.

Everything else, operator by operator, is in the guide's internet, fibre and SIM chapter, and the spaces with wired desks are in our coworking directory.