Gelephu is preparing for a crowd roughly five to seven times its normal population. The southern Bhutanese town, built to support a resident base of 15,000 to 20,000, is expecting more than 100,000 people for the upcoming 108 Chortens event at the Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) site — and the country's two telecom operators have been racing to make sure everyone can still get a signal.
Bhutan Telecom and TashiCell have jointly expanded capacity in the area, splitting the anticipated load between them: TashiCell is gearing up for around 40 percent of attendees (roughly 50,000 people), with Bhutan Telecom handling the remaining 60 percent. Together, the temporary set-up delivers about eight times the town's baseline network capacity, drawing on lessons learned from the Global Peace Prayer Festival, which also drew a six-figure crowd.
The build-out is substantial. TashiCell has installed nine base stations in the Zeeray area with a combined 48 GB of bandwidth, plus six more base stations at Tareythang. Campsite accommodation zones — where putting up new towers wasn't practical — are getting boosted existing infrastructure and added WiFi. Across key venues and lodging areas, visitors will find 4G, 5G and public WiFi deployed, with a target minimum speed of 2 Mbps per user even at peak load.
Even with all that, officials are candid: some congestion is likely with that many people in one place. Attendees are being asked to use mobile data sensibly, and there are two easy technical wins worth knowing before you go. If your phone supports 5G, switch to it — the higher bandwidth means less competition for capacity than on 4G. And activate Voice over LTE (VoLTE) through either operator's customer service; it routes calls more efficiently and generally gives clearer audio than standard channels when networks are strained.
For travellers, this is a genuinely useful heads-up. Project 108 is shaping up as one of the largest gatherings in Bhutan's recent history, and attending means planning around big-crowd logistics: expect busy campsites, stretched services and intermittent connectivity despite the upgrades. If you're heading to Gelephu for the event, sort out your SIM and VoLTE settings with TashiCell or Bhutan Telecom before the crowds arrive, download maps and tickets in advance, and don't count on streaming or video calls working smoothly during peak moments. If you're not attending but travelling in southern Bhutan around the event dates, be aware that network capacity in and around Gelephu will be redirected toward the event zone.
The event also offers a preview of Gelephu's ambitions. The gathering centres on the Gelephu Mindfulness City project, Bhutan's headline development initiative, and the scale of the infrastructure push — even the temporary telecom kind — signals how seriously the country is treating its new southern gateway. For now, the practical takeaway is simple: go if you're drawn to a historic gathering, but pack patience for the network and let 5G and VoLTE do the heavy lifting.
