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Comment by plantain | Hacker News Reader

What's baffling is the eSIM market seems to be substantially less competitive - you can almost always buy a local physical SIM with far more data for the same price. You'd think the cost for providing an eSIM would be less and MVNO's would be competing to drive it down.

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Yeah and here in Europe most carriers don't even support eSIM on prepaid services at all.

I always use prepaid as i hate nasty contract surprises and also because its actually cheaper here with most carriers!

Agree - especially annoying that there’s no reasonable and cheap plan across countries, checkout and search isn't much easier than getting a SIM card at the airport

Except in Germany, where you just can't buy a local SIM at all.

Actually I take that back, shady shops will sell you a SIM that can't be activated.

I'm unsure what you are talking about. I was in Germany recently and got an O2 Deutschland sim card without issue. I had to show my passport, but it was an easy process.

Things do change, so I did a quick internet search. Found plenty of websites with information on how to purchase and activate sim cards.

https://www.phonetravelwiz.com/buying-a-sim-card-in-germany-... https://abrokenbackpack.com/germany-sim-cards/

many others.

From what I've gathered, things can be a bit more difficult if you have a more exotic identity document and either want to use one of the cheaper MVNO providers (which generally don't operate any physical stores at all), or aren't in a position to visit the physical branch of one of the major carriers (Telekom, O2, Vodafone).

In that case customer identification is commonly done via the post office's Postident system (either at a physical post office, or online via video) or via some alternative video chat system, and those might not work for all passports from all countries worldwide.

>What's baffling is the eSIM market seems to be substantially less competitive - you can almost always buy a local physical SIM with far more data for the same price

Which countries? Of the few countries I traveled to, the cheapest esim (by using a esim comparison site) is cheaper than local sims for any reasonable amount of data (eg. 3 GB for a 2 week trip). The local sims sold at the airport might be "cheaper" on a per-GB basis, but they come with absurd amounts of data that you couldn't possibly use (eg. 30GB) so they are more expensive in actuality.

Esims-via-app usually seem to be permanently roaming.

That means I assume they are paying roaming rates to the local providers.

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