121–130 of 216 posts
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.
By US standards, Google Fi is cheap.
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?
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.
Does this allow one to keep their phone number?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Otherwise people would use it for IoT infrastructure. I certainly would.
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.
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.
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 see…
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.
Otherwise people would use it for IoT infrastructure. I certainly would.
The Switzerland availability sounds useful. Insane prices over there usually.
Note that it's not an actual subscription (although it's set by default to auto-renew), you can stop it at any time.
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.
For travelers’ eSIM (paid), many people whom I asked, have recommended Airalo - https://www.airalo.com I have no affiliation.
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.