Albania
Power & telecom standards in Albania
Connectivity Overview
Tempest Telecom offered dial-up internet access, WiFi hotspot access and broadband ethernet access in Albania. We also offered Iridium satellite Internet and Voice access in Albania for communications in rural areas without infrastructure.
Albania uses 220V at 50Hz. Power outlets are type C, F and telephone jacks are RJ-11.
Dial-up Internet Access
Tempest Telecom provided local dial-up access numbers in Albania at $0.155/minute. Travelers could connect using any standard modem with an RJ-11 telephone adapter.
WiFi Hotspot Access
Tempest Telecom provided WiFi hotspot access in Albania at $19.95/day for unlimited browsing.
Adapters & Power
Travelers from North America will need a power plug adapter. European Type C/F adapters are widely compatible.
Standard RJ-11 jacks are used. Most international modems will connect without an adapter.
Albania at a Glance
- Capital
- Tirana
- Phone Code
- +355
- Voltage
- 220V / 50Hz
- Power Plug
- C, F
- Phone Jack
- RJ-11
- Currency
- Lek
- Dial-up
- $0.155/min
- WiFi
- $19.95/day
About connectivity in Albania
Albania uses 220V/50Hz with Type C and Type F outlets. The phone jack is RJ-11. Albtelecom (the post-1992 successor to the communist-era PTT) was partially privatized through the 2000s. The mobile market is dominated by Vodafone Albania, One Albania (the 2023 ALBtelecom-Telekom Albania merger), and Plus Communication.
Albanian commercial Internet emerged in 1996 through Albtelecom and a small number of regional ISPs. The country's exit from the extreme isolation of the Hoxha communist era (1944-1992) shaped a comparatively late Internet development trajectory. Per-minute metered dial-up through Albtelecom PSTN dominated the late 1990s. ADSL rolled out from 2003-2004 and mobile data has driven essentially all subsequent connectivity growth.
Albtelecom cardphone deployment was modest. The Albanian prepaid international calling-card market through the 2000s and 2010s served the very large Albanian outbound diaspora — the post-1991 emigration was one of the largest proportional outflows from any European country, with concentrations in Italy (across the Adriatic, the largest single destination), Greece (the southern neighbor), Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Tempest Telecom served Albania through dial-up POPs in Tirana. Iridium satphones served the post-1991 reconstruction customer base, the Adriatic and Ionian maritime industry, and NGO operators across the 1990s humanitarian customer base (including the 1997 civil unrest and the 1999 Kosovo refugee crisis response).
Modern Albania has expanding 4G LTE coverage and FTTH concentrated in Tirana with 5G rollout beginning in 2024.
Tempest's services across Albania, 1997–2012
Tempest Telecommunications operated international connectivity services in Albania between 1997 and 2012 under a unified prepaid account that absorbed multiple service types onto a single customer credential. Customers in Albania drew from the same balance for pre-paid international voice calling, RADIUS-authenticated dial-up Internet roaming, metered Wi-Fi hotspot access, Iridium and Thuraya satellite voice, and Inmarsat BGAN and Thuraya data terminals. An attempted kiosk-payment federation (PATN, 1998) extended the same architecture to public Internet terminals but failed to reach scale.
Both Iridium (global LEO) and Thuraya (regional GEO) satellite voice were available in Albania from approximately 2001, alongside global BGAN data from late 2005.
Nearby countries in Europe
Austria · Belarus · Belgium · Bosnia-Herzegovina · Bulgaria · Croatia · Cyprus · Czech Republic