More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs
More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs
Travel eSIMs are all the rage right now and numbers show more people will ditch carrier roaming in the future.
Since way back in the 90s, everytime I stayed somewhere for longer than a week (or I really really needed mobile data) I would simply buy a local pay-as-you-go SIM for it.
This has been made even simpler to do with the advent of dual SIM phones were you can have a SIM for calls with your personal phone number and a different SIM for data.
Further, here in the EU ever since they passed some legislation some years ago, mobile operators can't charge extra for roaming within the EU so none of that is even needed anymore if you're just travelling withing the EU.
What exactly is the great advantage of eSIMs if you have a dual SIM phone?!
Currently in Tokyo from UK, paid for an Airalo esim before I arrived, and I was pretty impressed with how cheap and easy it's been- and that's with 20gbs data, which I've barely used.
My service provider O2 would have charged me £7 a day with their O2 travel bolt-on, but would have still been my usual contract of unlimited calls, texts and data, just that the data would have been throttled a fair bit. This is a lot more reasonable than it used to be, but still would have amounted in a large bill compared to the one off $18 esim.
Size of card aside, the notion of getting local provider sims or pay-as-you-go SIMs while traveling has been a thing in Europe for at least 20 years.
Is there a FOSS implementation of esim any where? AFAIK all privacy/security rom need to download a proprietary component to use esim, and such component need to run as root (as of now).
I wonder if this is another HDMI situation where implementing a FOSS version would violate some NDA of some sort.
I used to have to go buy physical sims and use a wifi hotspot when I needed internet in the places that weren't covered under EU roaming because the roaming rates were so insane. Now I spend a small fraction of that amount on an esim that lasts just the duration of my trip and gives me just how much I need, and I don't even have to visit a shop. I just do it from my phone. Massive improvement.
I'm in Chile right now. I have a local phone number and 20 gb for 30 days. eSIMs are amazing. I paid by at least 4x, getting Movistar through an app before I left, but my phone worked on the tarmac and I got to spend my first day exploring, rather than looking for a mobile shop.
Kinda nice that Google Fi gives you global roaming at no extra charge. Too bad it hardly ever works and text messaging is a shitshow.
Still used a travel esim on my last trip just to be able to reliably use my phone.
Probably dropping them soon because text message reliability is already a joke at home with them...
I'm using Roamless because the eSim is pretty cool, automatically swaps to whatever country I'm in, rates are near local prices, and the best part is it's pay as you go and your balance doesn't expire. There's plenty of other good services too, but they charge for a certain period of time while still being limited data. Some are unlimited which are pretty cool though, but haven't seen another service that's able to swap between countries like Roamless though.
The problem I had with products like Airalo is that if you are traveling and need to actually call a hotel, excursion, or any company in the country you are visiting you cannot do that with just a data eSIM like Airalo.
Sure you could use WiFi calling maybe but in my experience when I really needed to call someone I had to switch back to my original carrier and incur the $10/day fee.
free trial tmobile (esim)