After around five years of keeping it local, I decided to take another trip to a far-away country outside of Europe. The big issue with traveling to these places is the high cost of mobile roaming.
When I travelled in the past, I would buy a local SIM card. Typically, I paid 10 or 20 francs for a local SIM card with enough data for my stay. Normally, I would buy the SIM card at a phone shop, where I had to show my personal ID. Although communicating with the merchant was sometimes difficult due to language barriers, I always managed to buy a local SIM card.
Physical SIM cards are becoming redundant
A few months back I got a new smartphone. It happens to be one of the few Android devices that has eSIM functionality. Apple’s iPhones, on the other hand, have supported eSIMs for some time now. An eSIM is basically a virtual SIM card that you can download to your device over the Internet. You no longer have to deal with the hassles of getting a physical SIM card and inserting it into your phone.
Shortly before my trip, I searched for eSIM cards from the country I would be traveling to. There are many different offers from various telecom companies. Examples include Airalo, Airhub, Billion Connect, Esim2fly, Go Mo World, Holafly, Holiday eSIM, Maya Mobile, Redtea Go, and Ubigi. The offers vary in terms of how much data is included, their validity, and their price tags.
I had to take care not to accidentally subscribe to an ongoing plan. If I had, I would have been charged for the eSIM every month, even long after my trip was over.
There are huge differences between different eSIM offers for holidaymakers. Most offers are charged in US dollars. A few are charged in euros. I found several eSIMs with price tags below 10 US dollars. For less than 9 Swiss francs, I could get between 15 and 50 gigabytes of prepaid mobile data, depending on the telecom company.
7.63 francs for 50 gigabytes of data
I settled on Airalo. The offer included 50 gigabytes of data. Exactly 7.63 francs was charged to my payment card for the eSIM purchase.
I could buy the eSIM using Airalo’s mobile app. Requiring you to get a special app in order to buy an eSIM – a practice shared by Airalo and most other telecom providers that offer these eSIMs – is a downside in my opinion.
I then took a screenshot on my phone and sent it to my computer via the cloud. After opening the image on my computer, I used my phone’s camera to capture the QR code from the computer’s screen in order to load the eSIM to my phone. The whole process is still a ways away from being optimal.
My phone worked just fine during my holiday. I was grateful to have a cheap Internet connection. I only ended up using 893 megabytes out of the 50 gigabytes of data I got with the eSIM.
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