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Comment by dynamic_sausage | Hacker News Reader

The author seems to be unaware of the large market for travel data esims. Airalo and Ubigi are two examples of user-facing resellers of these, which make buying a physical prepaid sim near obsolete.

I would say that for travel, esim is much better than sim. Given that seamless data roaming is one of the main features of Google Fi, this opinion is not uncommon.

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Eh, although the travel data eSIMs are better than travel data SIMs, it still doesn't beat local SIMs.

For example, anytime I go back to Romania I pick up a ~6EUR prepaid Orange SIM card which has 2000 minutes, unlimited texts, and 6GB data with a bonus 120GB data on activation.

According to https://esimdb.com/romania, that same 6EUR offers 1GB of data.

Is it more convenient? Sure, a bit. But it's nowhere near as cheap for most local SIMs.

I have found that having a local number when I go to a new place is a big convenience. Doing things like ordering takeaway food online or trying to contact a hotel or some other service is a lot easier when not having to deal with an international call.

Most of the travel eSIMs don't provide a local number (esim.net is the only one I can think of off the top of my head) but getting a SIM at a corner store after getting out of the airport always does.

I recently used https://www.getnomad.app/ and it worked flawless. I like the convenience of enabling/disabling eSIM instead of fiddling with Sim Cards

Orange is a huge company that supports eSIMs already in their major markets. I'm not exactly sure about Romania, but this page does exist which leads me to believe they do support it. https://www.orange.ro/servicii/esim/

Based on my experience esim profiles are often not available for prepaid sim cards still.

This. ^

It's available only on postpaid/contract (abonament) services.

I'm not sure I understand your position. eSIM has been present in iPhones since the XS model. You were free to use it over a physical sim wherever supported. What's happening with iPhone 14 is they are upselling eSIM while reducing flexibility by eliminating the physical sim option. It's a feature reduction, not a feature addition. eSIM was there either way.

It's not a large market. I've used them myself on iPad when I travel (as they don't do voice or SMS, just data). Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Pain to move them to other devices or to recharge sometimes. Many are dirt slow as they're basically foreign carrier roaming SIMs rather than native local SIMs.

It works but I certainly wouldn't want it to be my only choice when abroad.

Travel SIMs are great but so are options. One issue with outfits like Airalo is they often give you an eSIM from a random third country carrier that happens to have a cheap roaming agreement in the country you are in, resulting in your data being routed around the world and 300ms+ pings.

There are countries either not available through Airalo et al or their offering is simply not price competitive with local SIMs (and in some cases even roaming prices with home carriers). I went to New Caledonia recently and looked into a vast range of eSIM options. Most could not offer access in New Caledonia at all (as the local telco seem to be very selective to whom they have roaming agreements with) and the few that did (IRRC) was priced in such a way that buying a local SIM was significantly cheaper. I did a quick look at pricing for other countries where they did offer service and I must say I was not that impressed with the prices compared to what I get via local SIMs and in some cases roaming agreements through my home carrier was cheaper. YMMV especially when it comes to smaller countries and destinations not usually frequented by tourists.

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