People here seem to quickly react by recommending their favorite travel eSIM provider. I'd propose what I find to be a bit more useful, a website that compares a bunch of different travel eSIM providers: https://esimdb.com
No affiliation from my side. I find it nice to know I always have many options.
It's not an "eSIM" per se, but it's a physical SIM card that has the eSIM module onboard. This lets your physical devices use eSIM providers.
One weird thing they do though is a strange licensing model where you can buy the physical card locked to one specific phone, one specific brand of phones, or any phone, plus a set number of eSIM slots. The Omni/15 is the "best" of them all.
You DO need an Android device to be able to set the active carrier; however, once the active eSIM slot is set you can pull the SIM and put it in something else and use that selected carrier.
It is just an standard eUICC card with an issuer certificate, which means you need issuer's app to access low-level eUICC functions on a rootless Android. This is how esim.me enforces the subscription.
This also means, you can use any LPA implementation to manage and install profiles on your own!
It usually needs to be priv-app installed, which means you have to build it in with the rom or add it with a Magisk module (don't use the one on github though it's horribly out of date, if you must... make sure your device is in light theme mode or you won't see the QR code and confirm buttons).
I can confirm esim.me works for it, it's just expensive for one of them. This service does not require an IMEI pairing to the EID because at least in the US it's using T-Mobile (at&t has a device whitelist and verizon requires a valid IMEI/EID in their database).
That's interesting cause on a a bigger german website we are trying to figure out how to get that firsty thing working with removable eUICCs since Feb the 16th. The only person that reported there that eSIM.me is working for them used a smartphone with a built-in eUICC for "looking at the app and receiving activation code" and after that put in the eSIM.me into a Galaxy S10.
Everybody else that wrote something about working or not working — no matter if they use products from eSIM.me, 5ber or sysmocom — wrote that it isn't working for them. Even when installing the profile with the static activation code from within the APK — that can be found when using apktool on the APK and a bit of grep — I wasn't able to get a data connection with the profile deployed to the sysmoEUICC1-C2G.
Btw. firsty seems to use Vodafone here.
However, firsty support answered today that they "are looking into support for these use cases, so stay tuned!"
Unfortunately it does not work with firsty, but it works like a charm with arbitrary esims while travelling. I last used it in Japan but also sometimes across Europe if I need extra data. I am super happy. Also with their support!
What's up with KYC "in accordance with German and European regulations" to use it?
A number of EU member states don't require any id/registration for prepaid (e)SIMs. How is that any of their concern if you're buying a profile from a 3rd party?
Most eSIM providers are just resellers, what I care about a travel eSIM is:
1. is it a reseller, if yes, from whom?
2. does it have local breakout in the target country?
3. what network does it use in the target country?
4. is it data-only?
5. does it allow tethering?
6. can I pay with Apple Pay?
7. can I use it without an account?
Very, very few eSIM services fulfil the second criteria above, and no comparison website I know off lists all the others.
Without LBO, an eSIM is worthless to me. Thus far, I have only found Truphone and bne to have LBO (at least where I travel to). I would love to hear about more options. No LBO no buy!
Do you have some references for the local breakout thing (preferrably technical docs/spec)? Seems like it would not be in Telcos interest to saturate their interconnects needlessly.
It means routing data to the Internet directly through the network the user is using rather than going to the operator's network.
When normal roaming, even though you use some local network, all the trafic gets tunnelled out from the local network to your own network provider, to the internet, and then back. So if you're from, say, France, and you visit Australia, all your traffic gets tunned back and forth to France. This is bad. Most eSIM providers work like this, usually tunneling through Israel or Poland.
With LBO you get direct Internet access just like you would with a local SIM.
Basically you need LBO to avoid a VPN connection to some random far away country.
Physical SIMs behave the same, but most people use SIM cards from specific countries rather than global SIMs, which are a niche business product not oriented towards consumers.
When you use a local SIM card you (almost?) never get LBO. Note that sometimes this is a feature, e.g. you can sometimes get internet in China this way.
The point, however, of eSIMs is to be "better" than your home SIM.
eSIMs usually offer a better price than your home SIM (while travelling), but they rarely offer better performance. In fact they often offer worse performance, because they often have a single POP in some weird country that is further way than your home country.
Global SIM providers, both physical SIM and eSIM have more POPs, often in the country you are travelling, or at least closer to it than your home country. Until recently these providers were out of reach of most people, since they did not sell directly to consumers, but now some of them offer eSIM, albeit at a higher price than the competition.
To answer your question though, unless the eSIM provider tells you under which conditions it has LBO, you can't know except experimentally, but that test has to be done from a specific location. They might have LBO only from some countries or from some network. For example, now I am in Austria and Truphone seems to be routing through Germany, which technically is not local, but it's still far closer than Israel or New Zealand (!!) that some cheap eSIM providers go through. bne seems to route directly through Austria though, beating Truphone in latency and even beating my local SIM in latency.
The good news is that many resellers cheaper than Truphone are actually using Truphone's backbone, but unfortunately they don't advertise than making it really hard to shop around without burning money for tests.
Does it show eSIM providers that explicitly do not provide phone numbers? In particular, ones whose eSIM does not list any phone number that the OS can see (many "data-only" plans still have a phone number the OS can see/use).
The closest I found on eSIMDB was a "Hide data only plans (no Voice / SMS)" option, but that's sort of the opposite. I'd like to see "Hide plans that have a phone number" for example.
Mainly I ask because Apple-using friends of mine have told me that it's impossible to remove (e)SIM phone numbers from the iMessage database. There is apparently no setting to use to prevent Apple from making a (e)SIM phone number an option for iMessage, so it's important to have (e)SIMs that provide no phone number at all, to ensure that iMessage can't get confused about which identifiers the user actually wants available.
This seems pretty cool, so it's free slow cell service in exchange for watching a video ad every hour, with optional prepaid plans for higher speeds/no ads.
It does seem that your cellular is only active for an hour after you last watch an ad, which is unfortunate if you want to receive notifications throughout the day.
How does it know that you watched the ad? Does it quiz you or what?
It actually sounds terrible. I can get a minimal prepaid sim for $30/year (200MB/mo + basic voice and text) and that sounds preferable to this thing with ads.
The cohort Venn diagram is world travelers who can’t afford a global service? People who can pay for a flight but would rather watch an ad than pay for service? And the value of that ad inventory of people unwilling to pay is?
I’m all for the effort, and I am fond of business models that more directly convey the revenue from ads to customers, but I have some concerns for this business. It all could fade pretty quickly.
I can change country with $60, it doesn’t mean I’m willing to pay $10/MB. I usually can get internet service for $10 or $20/month locally.
If I haven’t sorted out an eSIM before landing, it means I’ll be without internet until I go through customs. Airport WiFi isn’t at all a guarantee. What happens if I really need internet? e.g. some overzealous immigration officer really wants to see my hotel reservation or my return flight ticket.
I’d love to have a service that guarantees I have at least messaging in 60 (ad) seconds.
That seems like a bit of a strawman, honestly. The era of $10/MB international roaming faded back in ~2015, effectively crunching the demand for global roaming WiFi hotspot rental. Current pricing is somewhere around $10/day for 5-10GB for that model.
For US customers, T-Mobile US went to included global roaming at EDGE speeds (email, messaging), and Verizon is at the other end with $10/Day for 2GB at high speed (dropping to “3G” speeds after that).
Any business jumping into this space has to contend with that pressure and assailability, possibly relying on less-lucrative advertising bases of users outside of North America, Western Europe, etc. That doesn’t make it impossible, but I’d certainly be interested in the upper and lower estimates for the business potential. It just strikes me as a business where the network operators are really well-positioned to extract potential value while optimizing for the defense of their position. And when it comes time to re-negotiate terms, if this business is successful, network operators in regions with insufficient competition will be able to put the squeeze on, possibly forcing unworkable costs or loss of customer trust.
I hope this works out for them, for the reason that I also think that basic connectivity should be available to all, always, but those are the business concerns that immediately come to mind.
> The cohort Venn diagram is world travelers who can’t afford a global service? People who can pay for a flight but would rather watch an ad than pay for service?
At this point I laughed, as I don't have global service, yet have flown round the world in the last fortnight.
> And the value of that ad inventory of people unwilling to pay is?
Yeah, I'm never going to click on your ads. Don't build a business model on me!
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s nonzero. I just don’t know if it’s enough to overcome the tonnage cost (bulk rate for IOT/B2B cellular), and the business development challenges for global cellular and advertising are no joke when we’re down to a freemium-ad-supported revenue model.
Striking at the eSIM moment is a slick move, though. This would likely have been a hard non-starter in the physical SIM era (which still applies in some cases).
You can buy a SIM for $5 and get a free phone number that you can only use in their app, which has ads. I know plenty of people who that service could be very useful for, $5 one-time for unlimited text/talk, if inconvenient.
I do think that using Firsty and Google Voice together could accomplish the same thing for free, except Firsty's unlock-for-an-hour model means you can't receive messages when you haven't watched an ad in the last hour, so maybe TextNow still has some use.
> Striking at the eSIM moment is a slick move, though
I bought two data eSIMs to cover my trip - each one only covered one specific country.
To my frugal mind it wasn't worth paying the extra to upgrade to a 'global' data eSIM just to cover the handful of additional places I was in transit through (and turned out I had ready access to free wifi in those places anyway).
This looks amazing. Keep it installed, use it when I land (even if just to buy a better eSIM from Airalo). Don’t need to plan ahead, shop eBay, carry extra sims around. If I cross the border for an hour (live in Canada) might just use it for texts/slow web, or pay $2 for a day. Connivence factor is amazing.
It seems like it's your network provider so they have access to your network activity, seems like enough to know if you've watched a video or not.
And sure, you can pay and get a better experience, but not sure that's a fair comparison, this is free after all. If you can't afford to pay anything (sometimes people end up in shitty situations), then maybe watching a video for free internet isn't that big of a deal, when the alternative is no internet at all.
Unless this company is targeting the "homeless people who are denied entry at public spaces" market, how hard is it to get access to a free wifi hotspot?
Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution?
> Unless this company is targeting the "homeless people who are denied entry at public spaces" market, how hard is it to get access to a free wifi hotspot?
There are plenty of places where there are no "free wifi hotspots", like many places that fulfill the extreme "not a city" criteria. Maybe it looks differently where you live, but if I go with my car one hour inland I'll end up in places where I'm sure I wouldn't be able to just find free wifi hotspots everywhere.
> Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution?
I don't know, ask the company if they're planning to offer a global solution and if they say yes, ask them why? Not sure how that's an argument against the service in the first place...
> if I go with my car one hour inland I'll end up in places where I'm sure I wouldn't be able to just find free wifi hotspots everywhere.
What is the intersection of people who "have a car and are able to drive one hour inland" and "are so cash strapped that will subject themselves to a 'free' phone service that makes them watch ads every hour"?
Also important: who would be interested in advertising to these people?
> What is the intersection of people who "have a car and are able to drive one hour inland" and "are so cash strapped that will subject themselves to a 'free' phone service that makes them watch ads every hour"?
I'm talking about the people who live in those places already... The part about "if I go with my car" part is just to help you visualize that there are places outside of cities.
Again: what is the TAM for this, and if you are talking about North American exurbs/rural areas, why is this being marketed for international travelers?
What I am trying to say is that, while I am certain that you can fund this useful for a segment of the population, how big this segment needs to be in order to become valuable for (a) advertisers and (b) investors willing to sink money into it?
having this as a backup sounds nice to be honest. getting a sim card in the traveled to country was sometimes a bit of a hassle in the past... nowadays probably not so much. anyways, this might provide the time to get a sim card locally, as those often times used to be a lot cheaper, than some travel sim... and also might provide different coverage provider / network wise, depending which network they roam on...
I haven't actually made use of this yet, but Google Fi lets you purchase additional data-only SIM cards for $5 or $10 and then the data gets billed at $1/GB at the same rate without any minimum. So if you're only sending a few KB a day, you pay almost nothing.
As a current Fi customer, I believe that's correct. But I think this is also aggregated across all devices. So if you use 1KB on 5 devices, I think you only pay $1. There's also a limit of 4 data-only SIMs.
Good to know, thanks! Probably not something I’d want to use for a super low bandwidth application like hourly gps updates but definitely viable for something a little more “active iot”.
That's exactly what my mind jumped to when seeing this (free IoT!), can almost expect someone will try to build some sort of automated video watcher to work around this caveat and abuse it :)
Around 2000 there was a dial-up service called Juno. It took about 15% of your screen to show a rotating banner ad and had some time limit for use. As far as I recall every restriction was implemented in the client.
As such there was a really easy workaround to connect directly without using their software and bypass every restriction.
A guy I know used that workaround and at some point got a letter in the mail from them because he was in the top 1% of users of the service which was very costly to them so they terminated the account.
My hunch is even small scale abuse of a system can have a big effect. Even if it seems small it still might be impactful.
I set up a local BBS-like system and used the real NetZero* dialer to call it and attempt to log in. Then I changed my password and repeated the process several times.
That gave me the key to the Caesar cipher they used for the password.. so I could create a fresh account with a scrambled password any time I wanted.
At runtime, in the OS-provided ad-free dialer, I'd use the unscrambled password.
I also pre-created some accounts with unscrambled passwords like "apple" and "bicycle" to share with friends.
NetZero* ceased operations mere weeks after I started this.. Hm.
(* Was it NetZero specifically, or some clone? I forget..)
Reminds me of free dotcoms back in the late 1990s just up until the dotcom bubble burst: free but with a frame with a banner. 14 year old me enjoyed learning how to load (and then design around) my own page in that frame.
We weren't technically savvy at all, but still found a loophole. There was a version of the software that crashed after you had successfully connected. As long as you didn't update, you were ad-free.
Are there cheap LTE+ embedded modules that support eSIM? All the ESP32/Arduino boards with mobile data that I've used in the past required a physical SIM card.
I wonder how this works, if your cellular gets deactivated, how do you inform the service that you've watched the ad? Particularly if all you have is an app with no access to low-level system APIs like USSD, texting etc.
Is it just disabling your access except to a particular IP range and then enabling it back on receiving a HTTP request? Can routing in Telcos even work like that? Or is it DNS perhaps? That would seem to be the easiest layer to implement this on.
I don’t know how this company actually has things setup, but I suspect you’re right — it’s all done with routing tables. DNS tends to cache too much, and I think DHCP would either be too chatty or also cache too much to be used as a gate keeper.
Instead, a firewall/routing approach would make more sense. It would technically be no more difficult than setting up port knocking. Instead of pinging a specific port, you’d watch a video. But other after that, you could just route traffic.
What I’d be more interested in knowing is where this filtering is taking place. It would be better done on the phone, to avoid null-routed data going over the network (and costing $/€/etc). So, I’m guessing that it is all done within the eSIM app itself. Maybe something like getting a (signed) token after viewing the video that extends a time limit/expiration for the eSIM itself. Then when the eSIM is expired, it can only communicate with one service — the ad host.
I'm assuming this would be done by zero-rating their advertising service.
They already imply that they restrict traffic on their Free plan to certain services so I would assume they use the same mechanism to allow traffic to pass through their advertising service even when a users free plan has run out.
Simple version is the network router firewalls traffic to anything except the ad server, and the ad server will have a trigger to change the firewall. There are some technical nuances to how you handle DNS and also redirecting from other web pages (if desired) without breaking things. But that’s the gist of it.
As a citizen of a country where prepaid access is the norm, it's just DNS (mis)redirection. People call it "captive portal".
When your quota runs out everything you access resolves to the same address, which is an internal web site where you can buy more data.
And yes, it does not work if you use a custom DNS such as Cloudflare or Google Public DNS, or if you try to reach a HTTPS page. But they don't care, as it's a minority that does this. Android already has support for captive portals, and shows a notification when it detects one.
Still some non-travel potential I think. I might set this up on an old smartphone to keep in my car as an emergency backup, or maybe for avoiding risk to my primary like being on a boat, at the beach, etc.
It might target people who can't afford cell service, but I don't see how that's taking advantage of them. Maybe it's profiting off them, but nobody has to use it. If it isn't worth it to you, then don't use it, but if it is, then do, and that's better than if it didn't exist. Nobody is forcing you to use the app, though.
What do you mean by infrastructure cost not being important? They either take a loss on the free plan to get downloads, the ads cover the costs and they break even, or they make a profit. All of those options seem fine and potentially sustainable to me (not sure about the loss leader though).
It's about backing people into a corner who don't have the means to choose an alternative situation. No one is forcing you to have cell service? Sure they are! Good luck participating in society without it.
As for infrastructure costs, that's the entire service. How much does it really cost to provide 300kbit/s? Surely less than it costs to serve ads! Sure, you can turn a profit from the ad revenue, but that means your profit is the end user's attention.
My overall point is that we should not call ads "free". Watching ads is labor, and labor ain't free.
I had a Google Voice US number for almost 10 years that I lost because I could not do a verification from another US number. I verified with Twilio once as I was able to make their product work and receive a SMS from Google Voice but I couldn't make it work the next time.
I had created that Google Voice number back in the day when those SIP apps were a thing which offered you a second number. (I lived in India back then and still am).
I wonder whether there's an international eSIM that I can have without paying a regular "keeping the SIM alive" fee or paying a really really low free and recharge it whenever I want to actually use the data or SMS or calls when I need it which is usually when I travel?
Does any of these providers a retainer SIM that is kinda "pay as you go but no need to pay just to keep a SIM to receive SMS or so"? I would definitely need receiving of SMS.
What do you mean you lost it? Did Google deactivate it? I also have my GV since 2010 and I haven’t connected a US number in a decade (I do have credit on it)
I lost access to this Google Voice number. I received an email that I need to activate it and that means I had to attach some US number with it and verify with some SMS. I could not do it. I do not have any Google voice number on my account now. Also, I might have missed that "send at least one SMS or make a call every certain number of months" at some point.
Not in my case. I checked a few times in the last year and it was still the best among those listed, however still not as good as my Thai SIM card with their roaming plans.
-1 for Airalo - I've had an awful experience with their support.
Through what was definitely a configuration error on their end, my eSIM stopped working after I added more data to my plan. So for a week, I went from WiFi to WiFi in contact with their support, while they kept asking the same questions over and over again. Is roaming on? Yes. Have you entered the correct APN? Yes. Have you tried all providers? Yes. Is roaming on? Yes ...
Eventually I called for a refund and they denied it because, despite not ever loading a single website successfully on the new plan, I had apparently consumed ~10KB.
I saw some Reddit users reporting similar issues with their support. So if you run into issues, I would recommend calling for a refund immediately rather than trying to get it fixed.
There are more than enough similar providers. I switched to getnomad.app after that.
I'm a happy Airalo customer. But also, I don't expect to get any customer support from low margin convenience services like these. If my eSIM stopped working for whatever reason I'd just shrug and buy a new one. Why fight with some underpaid customer support agent when there are sights to explore...
In hindsight, that's definitely the lesson I've learned from this.
But let's be clear: My issue isn't that their underpaid support staff didn't know what to do, it's that they apparently don't have the policies in place to just say "f* it. We don't know whats wrong. Let's refund or issue a new SIM". That would have been cheaper for everyone.
I wish the prices were even remotely competitive, every time I check and compare, it's always _significantly cheaper_ to just get a SIM locally.
I just checked Morocco, and it's $31.50 for 5GB. I think I paid 7$ for 20GB or something.
Then again, I have a phone with a regular SIM card. Maybe the prices are comparable if you have a new iPhone with no regular SIM slot and are forced to use an eSIM. In my mind, eSims should be cheaper, since there's no physical component there, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the case.
I think that's country specific. For example, for Denmark its £4.70 for 5GB [1]. Thats probably cheaper than buying a local sim and worth it for the convenience especially as I tend to use far less than that and only need 1GB as I'll just go for a few days. Then I may as well pay for the £1.10, 1GB option.
Isn't that always inherently true? With travel SIMs, what you're buying is convenience. Not to mention, some countries have annoying KYC processes for getting SIM cards/service. Presumably this bypasses that.
If I'm buying a SIM, there's a physical cost to manufacture the thing. There's no such cost with eSIMs. Also, to sell me a physical SIM, the telecom has to employ somebody to stand there and sell me a SIM. With an eSIM there's a website and it doesn't matter if 1 or 1000 people are buying SIMs at the same time. I would think that eventually the ability to scale would push the costs of eSIM down to be cheaper/the same as regular SIMs, but we aren't there yet.
> With travel SIMs, what you're buying is convenience.
I guess I'm not the target market here. Spending 5 minutes to get a cheaper + better deal is worth it to me then overpaying for limited data to avoid having to talk to somebody.
> to sell me a physical SIM, the telecom has to employ somebody to stand there and sell me a SIM
In France there is a telco called Free, that has vending machines for SIM cards all across the country inside of various kiosks.
It’s pretty great.
I was there recently for a couple of months, and I went to one of these vending machines. Filled out some basic info about myself and paid with my debit card. The machine gave me a SIM card that I then put in my phone and have been using since.
The amount of gigabytes was decent too.
I am in a different country now, but still in the EU. Here I can still use the same SIM, but the amount of traffic that that plan gives me outside is pretty low compared to what it gave me in France. For now it’s been ok though, because here I have fiber at home. When I was in France the AirBnB we stayed at didn’t have any internet so that’s why I bought the French SIM with sufficient amount of gigas to get my work done.
Anyway, this vending machine in kiosks system is awesome. More telcos should do that in other countries too.
The local provider is, locally, usually a monopoly or near monopoly.
They want to own the whole customer journey, be able to market/upsell other products, etc. That's why they directly sell service at rates far cheaper than they will let roaming providers access.
There are some exceptions to the rule. I always go the local SIM route, and after burning through all my data from Andorra Telecom I decided to look at Airalo (and about 20 other eSIM providers). Airalo was cheaper for more than twice the data as buying a local SIM from Andorra Telecom. I could only get about 18GB/mo from Andorra Telecom (without a long term contract) but was able to get 45GB from Airalo and for a couple euros less per month. Also, the eSIM vs physical SIM was much more convenient.
> it's always _significantly cheaper_ to just get a SIM locally.
That's also been the case for me, but I haven't encountered a local carrier that agreed to sell a prepaid eSIM. It was always a physical SIM card, and I didn't want to swap out my home SIM because I needed to be reachable via text. (Plus: FaceTime & iMessage get reset if you do that)
I wanted to get a SIM card in Albania and they were charging €20 at the airport. After waiting for like 30 minutes for their slow-ass service of 2 people ahead of me, I just tapped 3 buttons and left the airport, getting half the data probably. I wish I had done it sooner anyway.
Airalo has decently cheap eSIMs, at least for the US (much cheaper than buying from the big telcos), and a part of the appeal is not having to hassle through buying and installing a chip.
I can buy the Airalo eSIM before boarding the plane and have it readily loaded when the plane lands.
Isn't it also necessarily true because the eSIM companies only resell bandwidth from the local telcos who actually own the network? Why would they let a third company undercut their prices...
I have friends who happily use Airalo but I can't bear the latency & slowness that their routing adds.
You're basically "roaming" on the local carrier, and your APN route you through an Airalo server. Which seems reasonable, except the server is some random OVH VPS with all the downsides of a noisy-neighbor cloud environment, and it's sometimes even all the way in the US. (Not to mention your geo IP is wrong and region-locked websites fail to load unless you find some local free WiFi. Netflix is also wonky thanks to that.)
That's fine for some countries, but in my experience, roaming with my home carrier was somehow faster & more responsive (despite the APN being all the way in Israel).
Airalo made getting a SIM in India so much easier. The KYC checks they introduced are poorly understood by local vendors making it really painful to get a local SIM.
Also, being able to pre-purchase the SIM card means you can immediately browse when arriving. When we arrived, the WiFi in Chennai airport couldn't deliver the OTP to our foreign phone numbers, so without the pre-purchased eSIMs we wouldn't have been able to get internet.
I don't like it that they charge such a premium, it makes having data as a tourist somewhat of a privilege. Also, local SIMs typically offer beside data also a local phone number, which can be really helpful.
> I don't like it that they charge such a premium, it makes having data as a tourist somewhat of a privilege.
I obviously don't like that the premium for an eSIM in a place like India is so high, but I think (having a brief look at esimdb.com) $20-30 USD for 10-15 GB is not unreasonable for the substantial portion of tourists to India who are already traveling from another continent [1], and considering it's in the range (±50% perhaps) of mobile data prices for a comparable plan in the UK or the US, I'm not sure it's that much of a privilege for tourists.
To be clear, I don't mean that the premium is warranted, but just that it may not be much of a privilege for many tourists.
> To be clear, I don't mean that the premium is warranted, but just that it may not be much of a privilege for many tourists.
Then we agree on that :)
For sure, it's not a big dent in ones budget for most travelers coming from other continents. The eSIM rates are indeed not that different from local rates. Looking at it transactionally, the premium is easily worth the convenience it yields.
Most of what I dislike about it is that being nearly forced to take the eSIM makes me feel more like an outsider.
Previous time I visited I did manage to get my local SIM, even though it took a couple of hours to find a store which was capable - and willingness - to issue one. This time, the regulation change caused my SIM card to get stuck in bureaucratic limbo because of new and poorly implemented additional KYC checks.
I appreciated the chore of getting a local SIM card, because it exposes you to integrate somewhat. It leads to interesting encounters outside of the normal tourist bubble, not just the people but also a bit in how their day-to-day business works. As such, I would like to be able to recommend others to try to get the SIM for themselves too.
Besides this 'stay in your privileged tourist bubble'-feeling, it also feels wrong that the premium between local data rates and the eSIM rates are that high. Even though the value-add seems minimal for anything other than skipping KYC completely and being able to pay with international credit card.
That difference goes somewhere and - I worry - that by fuelling that niche it only incentivizes the eSIM providers to lobby for borderline impossible KYC checks on local SIMs, which they can bypass for anyone able to afford that premium.
My comment does not say what you quoted, so I'm not sure which claim you are responding to because it appears to missing most of the context in my comment. I don't necessarily disagree with the text you quoted.
I also liked Airalo, worked very well. It was nice to use when visiting Montenegro. I paid 15 eur for 5 GB or so (valid 30 days)? But at the airport I immediately saw 100 GB for 5 eur or something like that :) (100 GB is practically unlimited, you can stream for a month and not hit it.) Still, it's nice to arrange everything from home before you leave.
I think many places allow you to get a very good esim deal locally nowadays.
That Firsty ad stuff actually sounds horrible.
You're in a beautiful country, now watch this ad every hour or go offline. No thanks, I'd prefer to go wifi to wifi then.
They are becoming a dime a dozen. Increasingly I find you can download the carrier apps ahead of time directly and keep 3-4 esims around indefinitely.
I get sufficient data for about $5/mo in just about all Asian countries this way. Most of the airports, even tiny ones, have wifi now - and it takes <5 minutes to set this up. The folks at the airport try to sell you overpriced tourist packages (or in Vietnam sometimes its a sim that fell off the back of a truck, they clone 'em) but you can just insist on an esim or wait until you're in town.
Google FI also lets you pause service for 3 months, so I turn it on for 1 day here and there and the credits roll over. I might get rid of it but it's a good backup at a known flat rate ($10/GB).
I used to use that provider in Germany - I don't like it because for some reason it only uses LTE and half the time I need it it's not working at all. :-)
The MobiMatter app that someone suggested above seems to be cheaper and also support normal 5G networks. It's been pretty reliable to me so far, i could recommend it.
I always recommend Airalo to collegues. I travel a reasonable amount and Airalo has been reliable for me and available in a lot of countries. Last year they didn't have Singapore (I think this was re-added?) and it was annoying and expensive to buy an eSim at the airport. Reminded me how great their service is.
Used Airalo recently on a trip to Switzerland. I think I paid 5€ for the cheapest plan and got a 3.5€ voucher that made my wife's eSIM 1.5€. Worked very well the whole time and everything was very smooth.
The standard EU free roaming does not cover CH, at least not on my plan, so I needed something like this.
I recently traveled to Europe and used an Orange France travel eSIM. No complaints. Might be a bit expensive though but then I got more data than I ever needed (12 GB is their next plan up from 1 GB).
Wow. 1.95 euros a day for the non-ad version? In India (where I live) I pay less than 3 euros a month for a 1.5GB everyday 5G connection and unlimited nationwide calls. So it's definitely not a "fair local rate" as they claim.
"Fair local rate" is indeed a bit ridiculous compared to actual local rates in some countries, but compared to roaming these rates are quite good. If I want to use my NL plan in India, my provider charges me €20 for a 2GB bundle or €2,50 per MB (yes, MB, not GB!). If I would only be there for a week or so, I would probably not bother with the trouble of getting a local SIM (and in some countries that is not even possible if you are not a resident).
Those data rates look outrageous! When I visited countries like USA/France, I got international roaming enabled on my phone and it was still close to effectively 1 USD per day, though data was limited to total 5 GB for a month's plan or 1 GB for 10 days. It was fine however as most hotels have Wi-Fi anyway.
Even though it's really spelled out in big letters on the webpage, I've made the same mistake. Just wasn't expecting mobile plans to have prices per day.
Was wondering how it can be that cheap, literally too good to be true sadly.
It will be available in India and most other countries by the end of March according to their own website, and I don't think they're going to change their rates in a month's time.
I don't know because I've never taken a one day prepaid card, but had I been visiting India as a foreigner I'd just buy a local prepaid card for a month considering it's so cheap.
Except with net zero you could just snoop the communications during login between your modem and the host, grab your login and password, then forget about net zeros software, redial the host with your own terminal program, paste in your credentials and boom you were online with no ads to watch :)
Someone didn't do proper QA on their home page: their Google Play/Android icon (under Get the app) doesn't even go to their app; instead it goes to https://play.google.com/store/games?hl=en&gl=US.
I manage my own ASN, I've been thinking of branching out, experimenting by creating my own eSIM.
Given the huge number of virtual ISPs offering eSIMs at various prices, I mistakenly assumed it would be relatively easy to find documentation on how to do that (perhaps via some ISP selling traffic bundles to virtual ISPs); maybe someone can recommend any resources?
I hope the business model is actually sustainable, because I've been using it since the app was shared here and I really like the free tier, especially because my main phone number is basically prepaid, so this is a massive upgrade!
There are not many actual operators that back those esim services, especially in the price conscious end.
A recent experience: get a sim that covered countries that I traveled during one trip: Singapore, NZ, USA. The operator ended up being Drei Austria and all the traffic passed through Austria which meant that:
- In Singapore the latency was high but essentially usable.
- In NZ, especially in the more remote areas it was often completely unusable even when there was cell coverage as the latency and packet loss killed all the fun.
- In NYC it was quite alright, nothing to cheer about but decent.
While in a recent trip to Japan we got a single country plan that was offered by Singtel .. traffic did a 10kkm round trip but was generally very fast.
I've had good luck with Keepgo (no affiliation) for low-cost backup eSIMs. Once you add the initial data, it's good "forever" as long as you add something to it once every year. I bought 10GB just over a year ago to have a backup on a different network than my primary plan. Recently added $3 to keep it alive for another year.
How does an eSIM work? Does it require any special hardware (beside the cellular radio, of course) on the phone or is it a purely software thing? If there is specialized hardware, is it a thing that can be later deconfigured/uninstalled or does it modify permanently my device?
I would assume not, but this FAQ feels weird: "Unlike traditional removable SIM cards, eSIMs are built into devices during manufacturing and cannot be physically removed or replaced by users".
Simplified: Traditional SIM card is "smart" card with a chip (exactly like modern credit cards) from your network operator that gives access to mobile network(s). The chip has software + data that allows this.
eSIM: same (or similar) chip is soldered into your phone. Software is different, and allows storing the data part from multiple operators at the same time. You use your phone to switch between operators and add/remove potential operators (add part is over the internet via your phone, either via wifi or current active operator).
By way of analogy you can download new "SIM cards" to your esIM, switch between them, delete them etc. It's a feature of your phone, either it supports eSIM (has such a chip and supporting software on the phone) or it doesn't. You can't add it later.
Interesting, might be useful as a backup connection.
Currently I am using https://silent.link since several years and I am very happy with that. For 5$ you get a eSim without any time limit and roaming in almost all networks in almost all countries. You just pay for ever MB of data a reasonable amount (not as cheap as local options, but not bad either). This is perfect as a backup eSim for traveling, even just in my own country because I can roam in all three available networks. You can only pay with Bitcoin/Lightning but it works great since 3 years or so. This is just so much better than all those travel sims which only work for 30 days in only one country...
I feel like the best mobile plan insofar for traveling has been Google Fi: $10/GB anywhere in the world, allows you to pause service and pay nothing, works both as a physical and eSIM card.
The downside: only available for purchase in the US.
Last year we took a two week vacation in Boston. I had to pay 16€ for 1GB/Week of data with my German T-Mobile contract, even when using T-Mobile US. This really sounds like a nice alternative.
Word of caution for people trying to activate this outside the supported regions: it does not work, it just stays stuck at “Activating” state on iOS with no way to remove the eSIM.
I live in Toronto and heard that in March, e-sim was adding Canada. Since I have family in Germany and contacts in the US, It would be helpful if I could use this service. My cellphone currently works in all of Canada. My cell phone is a Motorolla G(9)play with 2 sim slots. Would this e-sim work with me?
> Firsty's connectivity services are currently available in Europe, the USA, Turkey and Switzerland. We are actively working to expand our coverage and aim to offer global connectivity as of March 25th, 2024.
So the marketing claims are aspirational.
I still think it's a fascinating business. There must be a lot of number crunching going on regarding ad view rates and the most popular tourist destinations.
I would love something like this for my smartwatch. My main telco doesn't offer eSIM for smartwatches because they want you to switch to their premium brand.
If anyone knows something I'd love to hear it (Sweden)
Nothing is stopping you activating that esim on your smart watch... Just scan the QR code with the watch camera (assuming your watch has a camera - if not, I'm sure there is a companion app to do it)
Yes, but when you use the app, it shows you the "LPA:1$..." code you need to activate the esim on any device. If you don't want to type it, you can turn it into a QR for scanning.
Its great for tourists though. You can have your normal sim for use at home and just buy an eSim for when you travel overseas. I found it very useful and cheaper than a sim card for two weeks in Canada.
Over here, ( Netherlands ) you jump into a kiosk for a free prepaid and pseudo anonymous SIM card. Topping it up with 10 EUR gives you 10GB traffic. Double the money for a one month plan and you have unlimited traffic & national calls.
Best of all: when you are done with it, the trojan horse can be removed from your phone.
Given a lot of places now want traceable sim, I wonder is this legal in some countries. Or it just happened the global is meant countries that does not require ID to register phone sim?
Most of the travel eSIM services resell a SIM from a carrier in country A that has a favourable roaming agreement with a carrier in country B (where you want to use the service).
I just signed up for the Firsty app from the UK, and the eSIM it gave me appeared to be issued by Play Poland (https://www.play.pl). This then roamed on the EE network in the UK (https://ee.co.uk).
As the SIM is roaming, there's no practical way for any KYC requirement to be enforced. This is the same as if an AT&T customer in the USA visited India (for example) and roamed onto an Indian network.
Some of the eSIM providers like Airalo do offer certain plans with KYC requirements, but that's only for a minority of countries.
Failing to see how this is easier than buying an eSIM from a provider's website. We were in Paris for a week and buying a temporary prepaid eSIM from Orange was dead easy.
Shame they don't offer a physical SIM for a nominal fee to use with the free service. eSIM-only locks out a lot of older and low end devices that don't support eSIM.
If you want data only, you can get a 400 kbps unlimited data SIM (they also have eSIM) for 4 CHF per month from Digital Republic. Or 10 MBps for 10 CHF per month (see https://digitalrepublic.ch/en/private-customers-pricing/).
Note that it's not an actual subscription (although it's set by default to auto-renew), you can stop it at any time.
Is the app available in Europe or in the Google Play store? Will phones be able to handle 300kbit/s network speed in case an automatic update is running or an app is trying to download something?
> Will phones be able to handle 300kbit/s network speed in case an automatic update is running or an app is trying to download something?
"Handle" what exactly?
If your phone downloads data, it will consume those 300kbit/s
Android Devices with Android 7.0 or higher should have a "Data Saver" feature (check buttons in Notification area) which can limit data-traffic to foreground apps, in case you want to reduce the amount of "data vampires". Especially helpful when abroad...
iOS has a 'low data' mode option, which is helpful for low caps (and presumably, low speed) connections, as it doesn't do automatic app updates or photo syncing when that's enabled. It prompts whenever you want to download an app or an update with the size of the update and "are you sure?", which is handy just to have as a default anyway.
Ad supported products are cancer. Also, other than the comments here, it only says "no ads" on the premium offering. No mention of ads in the "how Firsty works" section".
Not only do I hate this model but who the hell can afford to travel to America but can't afford 2 euro a day? Why even have an ad tier?
* It's not really free. You need to watch an ad to get 1hr? of connectivity.
* It's 1.98EUR/day, 59.40 Euro (1.98/day)
While the ability to gain some cellular connectivity without paying exists,
The lack of better transparency for pricing and actual features makes it less promising.
This is so backwards. We now have cheap and fast cryptocurrency (I build Tonkeeper, a wallet for TON) and eSIMs that cover big chunks of world at a time. The cost is low, it's one-click purchase and you have a reliable connection without spam.
Basic human right is not to sell your soul for pennies, but to be able to buy things you need, cheap and easy without lame border controls and obnoxious banking fees.
> Basic human right is not to sell your soul for pennies
100% this.
And pennies is what these ads pay the company when you watch them anyways. Honestly, I would rather have a data plan that I could top up by paying them these ad pennies directly than watch YET ANOTHER ad - I get enough of those everywhere else.
No affiliation from my side. I find it nice to know I always have many options.