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.
Unless you are dangerously close to a non-EU country and can’t reliably prevent your phone from connecting to its networks
IMO they should have just made any roaming on non-EU-terms strictly opt-in. It’s madness that you can get billed ridiculous amounts of money just for being too close to a border or ship.
Originally it kinda made sense. Kinda hard to juggle through getting a deal with every single carrier everywhere
But it doesn’t.
If you don’t have a deal with the carrier, don’t automatically connect to it. That is so dumb, (and it also smells illegal to some degree) cause in some cases it can happen on accident, and paying for things you specifically don’t want is a really shakey basis in law.
shakes fist at Andorra
This time last year I stayed on Bardsey Island, off the Welsh Coast. There’s hardly any phone signal on the island, but they warned everyone to turn off roaming on their phones anyway. It turns out that because of the mountain on the island blocking the signal from the UK, lots of phones automatically connect to Irish providers, and cost more than people expect
It’s weird they wouldn’t work with a UK based telco to set up a relay station explicitly to prevent this.
Why prevent it, when you can just shrug your shoulders and rake in the money?
The telco likely doesnt make any extra from the roaming, they very likely pay it all out to the company the roaming took place on.
The island is tiny, and only has about half a dozen houses on it. The visitors are there because it’s a nature reserve, so generally don’t want to be on their phones anyway. It’s not worth setting up a relay station over just telling everyone before they get there.
Never thought of that. Scary though.
I’ve always been sent a text when I connect to the network of a different country. It happened immediately when I crossed over from France to Monaco, for example.
I’m always cautious about comparing the US to the EU too closely, but in this case it fits, as both are continent-wide common markets. If you “live and travel within the EU,” it barely counts as international travel for economic concerns.
I’m always cautious about comparing the US to the EU too closely, but in this case it fits, as both are continent-wide common markets.
The rest of North America would like a word with you…
No more so than Switzerland and the former USSR west of the Urals, I suppose.
AFAIK, most of the pan-European plans cover the whole Schengen Area (including Switzerland), and the most of the former USSR boarders aren’t all that porous, unlike the NAFTA boarders.
Let’s look at landmass - the US is equivalent in landmass to 16 Western OECD countries.
I haven’t seen roaming fees in the US for over 20 years. So you could travel 2500 miles and not once pay a roaming fee. Same with SMS - all messages have been included in my plan since at least 2005.
It’s hard to compare EU to US with something like roaming. Very few Americans travel outside the US regularly, so we’d need to look at something like hours outside home area per year, or something, to be any kind of useful - and there’s zero roaming within the US.
Also, you can go to Alaska/Hawaii and not pay roaming. Some plans include Mexico and Canada as well.
Yup. My wife went to Canada for a few days, so I bought a roaming plan. $20 and we were set. Yeah, that kinda sucks, but I’ve only needed to do that once.
If we go on a long trip somewhere, we’ll probably get a SIM, but it just doesn’t come up often.
Yeah I find it hilarious when Europeans make all the jokes about Americans not traveling abroad when traveling through several countries for them is just driving from Miami to Disney World for us. And if that comparison is big to them, they’ll lose their minds when they realize how big Africa is.
the travel distance is not the point in that criticism.
the “having to actually interact with different cultures” is the point. You can experience pretty much all climate and vacation hotspots without leaving the US. Which is cool an all. But that way people from the US are never really forced to interact with cultures that are not the US. Which is the reason for the “uncultured US tourists are never traveling abroad” stereotype
I do want to stipulate, that the US is full of different cultures. I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t have tons of shared culture here, but I feel its a disservice to ignore how many different cultures make the US
If you don’t include American Indians, the cultural differences in the US are miniscule compared to the cultural differences within Europe.
For starters, most countries in Europe speak different languages.
Even, say, the cultural difference between Louisiana and California is less than the cultural difference between France and England (even though those countries are neighbhours), IMHO.
What you’re probably seing as different cultures are probably just regional differences, same thing all of us think about our own countries, even people from small countries: it’s basically the same effect as the one that leads Eskimos to have a lot more words for different kinds of ice and snow than anybody else - when you know something really well you can spot all the little differences which in your eyes are very clear and obvious yet for others are miniscule or even invisible - it looks a lot different to you because you’re an expert in American English accents, the subtle indications of origin (not just regionals but also socio-economic) in the ways people dress, talk and interact in the US and so on.
Some decades ago I actually left my home country and went to live elsewhere in Europe (and ended up being over 2 decades abroad, in a couple of different countries) and one of my early realisations was how all those “differences” between people in my own country (which is Portugal, so quite small) that I found so important before having lived anywhere else were miniscule compared to the differences to people in another country.
I mean even native american nations within the US have cultural differences.
I wish I had a metric to go by, like number of shared common past times, language, legal structures, life goals, etc.
Like China Town vs a minnonite community vs the bayou vs rual Midwest vs New York vs Atlanta vs Islanders vs Indians on the Res vs Inuits vs Cuban Americans vs Mexican Americans is just a awesome variety to me. I’ve had the pleasure working with people in all those places and it really destroys the notion of “common sense” because depending how you are raised it really changes what you think is common.
You do have the melting pot effect multiplied by living in the era of mass communication and rapid transport too. So one person maybe surprised that you having handled a rattle snake or wrestled a gator or shot a machine gun or gone surfing, but you can talk about what just happened on game of thrones or the news.
I was really just talking about the dominant culture of a place, since once you include immigrant communities you do get a lot more variety but that’s outside the vast majority of people’s life experience in that country (there is a tendedency to self-segregate, to hide from the locals behaviours which would be seen by them as weird and to adapt the outside visible facets of that culture to the local environment - such as how Chinese food outside China isn’t actually like in China or even the same in different countries) plus that kind of cultural breadth applies just the same in all reasonably wealthy nation that attract immigrants from all over.
(Mind you, it’s really nice you appreciate the cultural variety that comes that way, just beware you’re only seeing a reduced, locally-adjusted, set of it unless you actually know well - to the level of having been to their place and met their family - somebody from that cultural background).
Cultural differences are a lot more than those surface things, they’re about stuff like expected behaviours (say, how people in Britain naturally form queues and are massivelly averse to giving criticism or how dutch people tend to arrange themselves in a circle when in a small get together at somebody’s home and are direct to the point of sounding insulting to the previously mentioned Britons), shared sports preferences, business and political culture (adversarial, compromise, confrontation avoidance), even things like what TV shows one grew up with.
In my experience moving to another country, we have a ton of expectations we are totally unaware off when it comes to contact to others (even stupid stuff like how people behave whilst walking on the sidewalk and somebody else comes) and which we are totally unware that they are unwritten conventions because everybody around us is operating under the same conventions.
Mind you, as a turist one doesn’t really notice the vast majority of those things when visiting a country.
If you’re travelling to another country, you also get a different culture, architecture, cuisine,… even if it’s “close by”. That’s the real criticism here that people don’t get, if you’re only travelling within the US, everything’s pretty much the same, and you’ll never expand your horizon much
Although the EU has some similarities to the US at the federal level, every country is its own sovereign nation with distinct rules and regulations, pricing, culture, language, cell phone providers, etc. It’s very different than traveling between states in the US.
Beware of Switzerland !
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.
They bet on the fact that most people will pay their bullshit fees because they don’t know any better.
Me in india paying 10 dollars for 3 months with 450 GB data and unlimited calls lol.
Western internet prices are insane
Convert it into median wage working hours and it all makes sense
It only means that the prices are adjusted to get the most out of what people have, not that it costs what its worth
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And lower population density. At least in the US, there’s a ton of empty space with pretty good coverage. I imagine India has a lot less open space, so more paying customers per tower.
The salaries for people building and operating the infrastructure are probably a bigger component though.
15€/month, unlimited 5G data (no data cap), France.
Still almost 5 times higher (even though pretty cheap!)
Considering that, according to a consultancy I worked for, indian workers were 9 times as cheap as spaniards (comparing workers in our company), and spaniards are one of the chespest in europe, i’d say that the indian price is more expensive accounting income.
Yes, compared to income, but it only proves that prices are adjusted to milk consumers of as much as they can, and not to just cover expenses and make a reasonable profit.
Prices are adjusted form profit of course but there’s also the workforce cost. Maintenance and support workers need to be paid accordingly to what people of the country earn.
If you factor that the ‘reasonable profit’ should also be scaled around the median income, the prices now make sense.
Now, you could say that both of those are inflated for excessive profit, but that’s another discussion.
20gb for 20EUR in Germany on a pay as go plan.
Judging by the prices in the various countries I’ve lived in, in Europe, mobile data prices are a pretty good indication of a cartel.
In my experience Germany is one of the worst (by comparison to what you quoted, I use to get unlimited 4G in the UK for £10/month some years ago) though my own country, Portugal, is even worse.
I bet there were “radio spectrum” or “mobile operator license” auctions won by a handful well connected large companies and there’s nothing in the law forcing them to open their networks…
I pay that for 20GB, it’s so fucking shitty having to be vigilant about your data spending, then they do a research here where they say most people don’t spend the majority of their data. Of course we fucking don’t, if you do you can’t access ANY online service, you don’t get shitty speeds you get no internet at all so most people don’t risk it by going through the limit.
20GB is a lot though. I use about 1GB. I spend most of my time on WiFi, so I really don’t need much.
8 USD per month for unlimited data (100GB FUP) and unlimited calls to all network. Including unlimited high speed data for social media and gaming, no data cap. Malaysia.
About $8.5 for 365 days with 60 GB data and 200 min calls in Thailand. If I need more calls, it’s less than $3 for every 200 min (365 days, again).
Is this just a switch to eSIM from regular SIM? Travel sim cards have been a thing for at least two decades.
Yeah. Before your options were roaming or waiting till you get there to get a physical SIM.
Today I can get an app that will install the esim before I get to the country so I’m ready to go out the gate. Also pay per day options.
Rates seem really good this way.
Not as good as the local sim (in Asia not by a long mile if I recall correctly), but it’s way more convenient. Then again, here we can get some daily limited (500MB-1GB, depending the country) data roaming packages for the equivalent of 1-2€ daily. If it’s quite a few days I’d go local sim, it’s a bit of a hassle the first day, but their data packages are silly cheap. I guess in Europe/US/Canada I’d consider seriously some Airalo or equivalent.
There are lots of countries where they won’t sell you the cheap local plans as a tourist anyway.
How is it not as good as a physical sim? They are the same rates.
With Airalo? Not really. If you manage to get the eSIM from the local provider, then sure, you can get the same rates, and before you even pack for the trip. But not all local providers are so readily to offer you an eSIM. And Airalo offers convenience at a not terrible rates, but definitely the best rates are local providers, physical or eSIM.
Heard Holafly 😉👍 in App Store is a money saver when traveling. You just have to make sure your phone is unlocked.
Basically just physical sim for home and eSIM for traveling as most phone today are dual sim (ie… sim and eSIM) built in
eSIMdb is good place to find even more options :)
It’s also the ease of it. I travelled to Indonesia a while back thinking I could pick up a SIM card once there. I didn’t realise you have to register the phone itself for tax reasons (?) to white list the IMEI of the phone before buying a SIM card. It was loads easier just to buy a roaming eSIM after I arrived. In hind sight I probably could have got a better package had I shopped before hand but it got me out of a tricky situation.
Same issues in Turkye. You have to track down a shop and they’ll fleece you because they flat out refuse to sell you the cheap options under various pretexts. If you use the SIM for 6 months you have to register your IMEI, and if you don’t they expire and you have to do it all over again. So yeah, having an eSIM is a big improvement.
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.
Yes, $15 CAD/day to “roam like home”. I have an Orange eSIM that I can keep alive if I use it at least once every 6 months - with a local french number that stays mine. It costs me about $40 CAD for a 30 day - 20GB top up. My wife uses Nomad for data only, we both don’t need local numbers, and it generally costs $12 CAD for 5 GB 2 week top-up.
So I figure about $60-70 CAD for 3 weeks travel virtually anywhere in Europe. Calls and SMS included (for one) without long distance charges. Compared to $630 for “roam like home” for two people from a Canadian carrier - doesn’t matter which one as far as I can tell.
We both recently got new phones to be able to use eSIMs.
And the physical SIMs stay active. So my elderly parents can call my Canadian number if there’s an emergency and it will ring through.
In fact, on our last trip to Rome, when we used a credit card at the hotel, it was refused and then seconds later I got a text from the bank asking for confirmation on my Canadian number. I had no choice but to text “Yes” back, and that single text activated roaming for the day and cost me $15.
Yeah the EU is just awesome for being able to just hop from country to country, it’s the same with the wireless roaming as it is with your person.
Yeah, I keep that for emergencies (you only pay if you use it) and also turn my Telus on occasionally to check text messages and do two factor authentication (incoming texts are free), but CAD$15 a day to “roam like home” is more expensive than an entire month with a local SIM in many countries.
And yet still a vast improvement on the old model of “you went off airplane mode, please sell your plasma while applying for a second mortgage.”
@wjrii @JohnnyCanuck Way Back When™ I worked at a telco, we had a customer go over seas on a sales trip, used his phone like normal, and then came home to a phone bill up around $35k.
I don’t know how much he made while overseas, but he wasn’t *that* upset about the phone bill, outside of him kicking himself for forgetting to get a data pack.
Haha true!
I hate having to use it, but when so many terrible services only allow sms 2fa it is mandatory to have as an option when travelling out of country.
In Canada the way to work around 2FA SMS is to have mobile data roaming off with roaming on, (then switch your sim card to your home number). The incoming text messages and leaving incoming calls ignored won’t charge you. It will only charge if you use any mobile data at all, send a text, SMS, MMS message, make any call (including to voicemail) or accept any call (some charge for rejecting a call but won’t if you let it timeout on its own).
Same as Australian carriers. Mine is $A10 /day (about $7 USD). If you’re travelling for a long time the cost can eventually add up and it’s possible to get some cheaper travel sims. But it’s just so much easier to not do anything and use your phone as normal.
Big improvement from the old days of roaming.
Got a T-Mobile eSIM while travelling in the US last year to get around this. The eSIM was a great deal (can’t remember the specifics, but pretty cheap with a decent amount of data). I was making two trips to California and Georgia in the same 30 day window, so it was useful to have.
The only downside was that I couldn’t activate the eSIM before getting to the US, and LAX didn’t appear to have any WiFi while we were there (not sure if that was generally true for the time, or if it was just offline). So I wound up having to roam to get the eSIM, and to get a text message from the shuttle that was picking us up from the airport (as I had to give them that in advance, and didn’t know what my US number would be until I got there).
Still saved us some money, but it was a bit of a PITA to activate with no WiFi available at the airport.
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?!
In some countries it’s not easy like walking in to a store and getting a prepaid card. You need to have an ID and a local address, probably to prevent bad events which use sims cards. A travel sim could be easier but more expensive.
eSIM is much easier and can be activated using an app.
Yeah, I wanted to do this in Iceland a number of years back, and they needed a local bank account in order to open one.
My Icelandic father-in-law helpfully offered to put it on his own bank account, saying he’d just cancel it at the end of the month. This was acceptable. Gave him like £10 to pay for it.
Went back two years later. You’ll never guess what he’d forgotten to do…
What exactly is the great advantage of eSIMs if you have a dual SIM phone?!
If the phone supports a normal and eSIM at the same time, they are equivalent. Because in many countries, dual SIM phones are (and will be) harder to get than single SIM ones, so having eSIM at least allows that.
You can have as many esims as you want too, so you can have 10 numbers or data packages if you want. Just open the app, buy one, install it and it’s ready to go, no need to deal with phone companies.
Do they all connect to their phone networks at the same time? I doubt that…
I’ve never noticed that they disconnected if I had them enabled. But I’ve never had more than a couple active at a time.
What exactly is the great advantage of eSIMs if you have a dual SIM phone?!
eSim means you don’t have to go to a store to get a physical SIM. You can use a ‘SIM store’ app to get an eSIM for wherever you are.
Another minor advantage is that you don’t need a SIM PIN as the SIM is a physical part of the phone. So you only need to enter one code when you restart your phone.
What exactly is the great advantage of eSIMs if you have a dual SIM phone?!
They are slowly phasing our sim card slots, my phone only has one sim card slot + eSIM. Without the eSIM, I’d be force to change or buy a new phone.
That’s like saying that the advantage of DRM in media files is that consumers are forced to use it.
The only advantage for consumers I see for eSIMs is that they can be bought online and digitally delivered, so mild convenience, which is nice, but not quite as amazing or filling a great necessity as the OP tries to make it sound like.
Beyond that, well it creates new business models and is probably cheaper for mobile phone makers, which are advantages for others, but not for consumers since the barriers to entry in the mobile arena that make it prone to cartels aren’t in the provision of SIMs, they’re in things like radio spectrum licensing so eSIMs aren’t going to cause a price revolution in that market.
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.
Used Airalo in the EU last year, only complaint was it took a few hours for the data to work reliably, but it was 100% after that. I’ve recommended it to everyone I know traveling.
I’ve used it in India last month. Same experience, definitely will use it again on other trips.
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!!!
Ah. I see you were contemplating Verizon global choice
Ugh yes, nailed it!
I love Airalo. I have used it in 3 countries and works without any issue. I even use it in the US when I reach my data limit as I’m not on an unlimited plan.
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.
Well, this is a bit tricky to answer:
- The e-sim in a phone is a separate chip with proprietary firmware. The chances of a FOSS version of this HW are nearly nonexistent. It would require developing your own silicon and putting it into your own phones. Chances of FOSS FW for this proprietary HW are also very small, because it is difficult and there is not much reason to do so.
- Currently, registering an e-sim requires a proprietary app (usually google). There is no FOSS alternative. Work on one is slow and there are some IP issues.
- Using an e-sim does not require a proprietary app. So you can remove google services or remove their access to the e-sim HW once you have it registered. GrapheneOS uses this.
Huh, TIL, an esim is literally a sim soldered into the board.
Now I wonder, could something like the Pinephone FOSS modem firmware register a sim and resolve point 2?
I am not an expert but I don’t think a modem has anything to do with registering the e-sim.
Even if it did, the hard part is probably getting the e-sim data/keys to be registered, not the uploading it to the e-sim chip itself.
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.
There is better: eSIM that let you buy cheap data anywhere in the world.
Revolut offers one, also ubigi which is even cheaper.
This way you don’t even need to find out which operator to use in which country.
Not sure how this is different. I don’t really find out which carrier I’m using in each country, I use an app which lists all the countries and the offers available. I choose one and install it on my phone. Usually it’s a limited time eSIM just for the duration of my trip.
What app is that?
Airalo
I just have a carrier that gives me free international data and calling, regardless of the level of plan.
I’m betting that doesn’t work for every country in the world with unlimited data. If it did, I’d like to hear the carrier that pulled this off and the price of the service.
T-Mobile and Google both do it in 215+ countries for unlimited basic data (not 5G). T-Mo charges between $75/mo for that and $90/mo for 5G data internationally (not unlimited). Google charges $35/mo with unlimited data (doesn’t guarantee 5G). It’s not difficult for them to do or even expensive. Most just choose to make it more expensive.
Well it’s still a lot more expensive than the $5-$10 I pay on an ad hoc basis for an eSIM when I need one every few months, even if I was traveling almost exclusively 100% in countries where I needed non eu data packages it probably wouldn’t pay off, but it’s good to know it’s out there. I guess if I was in that situation it would probably be worth it just not to think about it (at least the Google price would be).
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…
Interesting that you’ve had such a negative experience with Google Fi. My job requires regular relocation around the globe plus frequent international travel. I have yet to visit a country where it doesn’t work for the ~10 years I have been with them.
If you have a pixel 8 I actually had to bring mine back because the modem would regularly just fail to send text messages or failed to do the proper handshake for a data connection
I have never used an eSIM, but I’d like to know about them. Can anyone explain what are some reasons to use it?
I was in Japan 1 week ago. I couldn’t get roaming to work with my carrier mint (which may not have been there fault, it’s a long story) but I needed data or I would have no way to navigate Tokyo. I paid $25 for 14 days of unlimited 4G data in all of Japan, I downloaded an esim, boom now I have data on my phone again. Easy.
I did all of this on free airport WiFi.
And once u have a sim on ur phone u can switch which sims you have active at a givin time, which had no value to me, but could be useful for other, especially someone who may travel frequently.
I pay more than that as my regular rate.
The City pays me an $80/month cell stipend for a work phone and the only reason it even covers my work phone is because I had an old backup phone I was able to activate.
If it weren’t a public job I’d just use it towards my regular phone bill, but I don’t want my personal phone to be subject to Open Records.
Yeah I pay $20 a month with mint. They’re a killer provider, u get a lot for almost nothing.
