The last time I wrote about getting a SIM card while traveling, I recommended that most people skip the hassle when going on American-length trips abroad. Tolerating the slower roaming from your US carrier (or paying the extra fee for faster speed) outweighed the benefits versus waiting in lines at an airport kiosk or dealing with flakey online SIM sales.
Since writing that though, there’ve been a number of newer and better options in the eSim space which I’ve been using, and I’m starting to purchase them more often. For those who aren’t familiar, an “eSim” is essentially a way to get access to cell phone service without getting ahold of one of the physical SIM cards which gets inserted into the side of your phone. Instead, it’s just a QR code or magic link which gives your phone the information necessary to connect to a new network.
In the Apple ecosystem, eSims have pretty much totally replaced physical SIMs – in the US, iPhones no longer have physical SIM slots (iPhones bought elsewhere still have a slot). Most Android phones do still have physical SIM slots.
One major caveat to this conversation remains – phone locking. When you buy a phone in the US, it’s often through some sort of financing deal. Generally, until a phone is fully paid off, it’ll be locked so that it can only be used on a single carrier. This locking also prevents you from purchasing an eSim in most cases. The FTC introduced a rule over the summer which would have required carriers to unlock phones after sixty days, but there’s almost no chance that rule survives in the Trump administration. (We wouldn’t want to upset our precious cellphone carriers)
Buying an eSim
Because there’s no physical component to an eSim, they can be purchased directly on your phone using an app. There are a whole variety of “eSim store” apps. These include Airalo, Holafly, and my current favorite, Mobimatter. If you’d rather look online, eSimDB is the most exhaustive index of eSims, with useful filtering options.
After installing one of these apps, you’ll be able to search for eSims by country, region, or even eSims with global coverage. Then, you’ll be able to compare costs, features, and networks. This last point is one of the reasons I’ve become a big fan of eSims. While T-Mobile provides great international features, their roaming partnerships are often with smaller local carriers, rather than the market leaders. This can be fine in cities, but in rural areas, it can be limiting. For example, in Morocco, T-Mobile mostly roams on the Orange network, rather than Maroc Telecom, the large national carrier.
One important limitation with most eSims – they generally only provide data. There’s no coverage for making voice calls, and no coverage for sending SMS messages. As we’ll see, that’s not a huge limitation in most cases, with one caveat. If you need a local phone number to receive text messages as part of the sign-up process for something (like a local Uber competitor for example), you might need to look at other options.
Using an eSim
I’ve only used an eSim on an iPhone, so I can’t speak to the Android experience. I’m guessing it’s very similar though. After making your purchase, you’ll activate it by tapping a button or clicking a link. iOS then walks you through a few basic questions about how you want to use the eSim. This is by far the coolest thing, as compared to the old physical sim experience. With an eSim, your existing cell phone service stays active, in addition to your new eSim. You’ll get asked which SIM card you’d like to use for phone calls, for texting, and for data. So, you can continue to make and receive phone calls and texts on your US phone number, while all of your data usage takes place using the eSim.
In addition to potentially saving money versus roaming with your home carriers, eSims also provide some nice quality-of-life improvements. First, they’re more likely to have access to the latest and fastest networks. Whereas your home plan might only roam on 4G/LTE, eSims may roam on the faster 5G network. In addition, when you’re roaming, all of your data traffic gets funneled back to the United States before it makes its way to its destination. So, if you’re in Morocco accessing a local restaurant’s menu, every bit of data might be going all the way to Texas and back. This can mean that even a 4G connection “feels” slow because of limits of the speed of light and the latency it introduces. Connecting to the same network, an eSim will feel meaningfully faster – they might still route your traffic through a regional center, but generally not all the way across the pond.
eSim providers all make it easy to check your usage and buy more credit. Simply open the app you used to purchase the eSim originally to check your current balance or purchase more data. If you’ve ever struggled with a phone tree in another language trying to activate a “top up” card, you’ll understand how convenient this is!
When You Get Home
When your trip is over, you can go into your phone Settings app to remove your eSim. I’ve found that it’s very helpful to fully power off and back on my phone after doing this – some apps seem to get a little confused by the process.
So, if you’ve got a phone which can support an eSim, consider it for your next trip. If nothing else, it’s fun to experiment with, and it won’t cost more than a few dollars.