Connectivity — Argentina
What travelers need to know about connectivity in Argentina. What is legal at home can be a serious crime here — each rule links to its official source.
Connectivity in Argentina: restricted — there are real limits travelers must follow.
You can buy and use a mobile line in Argentina, but not anonymously. Ley 25.891 requires every company that sells mobile equipment or terminals to record the buyer's personal, parentage and address data, and, where the buyer is not the user, the end user's data as well — and this applies even to handsets enabled only for use with prepaid top-up cards (art. 2). If you imported your own handset, the licensed operator must see your customs import papers in your own name with duties paid before activating service, and may not activate the line without them (art. 5). Mobile services may be sold only by legally authorised operators; resellers and wholesalers are prohibited (art. 1).
Ley 25.891, art. 12: six months to three years' imprisonment for acquiring by any means, or using, a handset or SIM card knowing it to be of illegitimate origin. Art. 10: one month to six years' imprisonment for altering, replacing, duplicating or otherwise modifying a line number, or the electronic or mechanical serial number of a handset or SIM, in a way that may harm the subscriber, the user or a third party.
§ Ministerio de Justicia (Argentina), Normativa / InfoLEG — Ley 25.891, Servicios de Comunicaciones Móviles, arts. 1, 2, 5, 10 and 12; currency checked against InfoLEG's own register of norms modifying or complementing Ley 25.891 (verVinculos modo=2, id 95221), which returned an empty tableVerified Oct 6, 2026