More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

Unless you live and travel within the EU. Then you can use your phone as much as you want and know that you won't get a higher bill than usual.

It's maddening that my telco will negotiate a roaming rate on my behalf, and it's 100x worse than what a random dude in a supermarket can sell me.

Me in india paying 10 dollars for 3 months with 450 GB data and unlimited calls lol.

Western internet prices are insane

Is this just a switch to eSIM from regular SIM? Travel sim cards have been a thing for at least two decades.

Most Canadian carriers do a "use your plan like you would at home" but the price for it is about USD 10 per day, which is a huge cost compared to many travel eSIMs or a local SIM/eSiM.

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.

Thank you for posting, I never really pursued this but just downloaded Airalo for an upcoming trip and I’m really excited to not pay $10/day with my carrier!!!

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 just have a carrier that gives me free international data and calling, regardless of the level of plan.

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 prefer to use my pocket wifi that uses sim card for data. Then I can share my data with my partner or/and friends.

free trial tmobile (esim)

I have never used an eSIM, but I'd like to know about them. Can anyone explain what are some reasons to use it?

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.