Firsty.app – free 300kbit/s eSIM for US/EU
firsty.app
firsty.app
No affiliation from my side. I find it nice to know I always have many options.
It's not an "eSIM" per se, but it's a physical SIM card that has the eSIM module onboard. This lets your physical devices use eSIM providers.
One weird thing they do though is a strange licensing model where you can buy the physical card locked to one specific phone, one specific brand of phones, or any phone, plus a set number of eSIM slots. The Omni/15 is the "best" of them all.
You DO need an Android device to be able to set the active carrier; however, once the active eSIM slot is set you can pull the SIM and put it in something else and use that selected carrier.
This also means, you can use any LPA implementation to manage and install profiles on your own!
Some examples:
https://github.com/Truphone/LPAdesktop Needs a smart card reader and a pc to work
https://github.com/estkme-group/lpac Could either use a smart card reader or an actual modem with AT-support
https://gitea.angry.im/PeterCxy/OpenEUICC Needs a root on Android
Furthermore, I believe you could manage it via Windows settings if your window laptop has a WWAN card.
Everybody else that wrote something about working or not working — no matter if they use products from eSIM.me, 5ber or sysmocom — wrote that it isn't working for them. Even when installing the profile with the static activation code from within the APK — that can be found when using apktool on the APK and a bit of grep — I wasn't able to get a data connection with the profile deployed to the sysmoEUICC1-C2G. Btw. firsty seems to use Vodafone here.
However, firsty support answered today that they "are looking into support for these use cases, so stay tuned!"
It usually needs to be priv-app installed, which means you have to build it in with the rom or add it with a Magisk module (don't use the one on github though it's horribly out of date, if you must... make sure your device is in light theme mode or you won't see the QR code and confirm buttons).
A number of EU member states don't require any id/registration for prepaid (e)SIMs. How is that any of their concern if you're buying a profile from a 3rd party?
1. is it a reseller, if yes, from whom?
2. does it have local breakout in the target country?
3. what network does it use in the target country?
4. is it data-only?
5. does it allow tethering?
6. can I pay with Apple Pay?
7. can I use it without an account?
Very, very few eSIM services fulfil the second criteria above, and no comparison website I know off lists all the others.
Without LBO, an eSIM is worthless to me. Thus far, I have only found Truphone and bne to have LBO (at least where I travel to). I would love to hear about more options. No LBO no buy!
When normal roaming, even though you use some local network, all the trafic gets tunnelled out from the local network to your own network provider, to the internet, and then back. So if you're from, say, France, and you visit Australia, all your traffic gets tunned back and forth to France. This is bad. Most eSIM providers work like this, usually tunneling through Israel or Poland.
With LBO you get direct Internet access just like you would with a local SIM.
Basically you need LBO to avoid a VPN connection to some random far away country.
I'm curious, why Israel and Poland? Are a lot of eSIM providers from there?
When you use a local SIM card you (almost?) never get LBO. Note that sometimes this is a feature, e.g. you can sometimes get internet in China this way.
The point, however, of eSIMs is to be "better" than your home SIM.
eSIMs usually offer a better price than your home SIM (while travelling), but they rarely offer better performance. In fact they often offer worse performance, because they often have a single POP in some weird country that is further way than your home country.
Global SIM providers, both physical SIM and eSIM have more POPs, often in the country you are travelling, or at least closer to it than your home country. Until recently these providers were out of reach of most people, since they did not sell directly to consumers, but now some of them offer eSIM, albeit at a higher price than the competition.
To answer your question though, unless the eSIM provider tells you under which conditions it has LBO, you can't know except experimentally, but that test has to be done from a specific location. They might have LBO only from some countries or from some network. For example, now I am in Austria and Truphone seems to be routing through Germany, which technically is not local, but it's still far closer than Israel or New Zealand (!!) that some cheap eSIM providers go through. bne seems to route directly through Austria though, beating Truphone in latency and even beating my local SIM in latency.
The good news is that many resellers cheaper than Truphone are actually using Truphone's backbone, but unfortunately they don't advertise than making it really hard to shop around without burning money for tests.
YMMV though.
The closest I found on eSIMDB was a "Hide data only plans (no Voice / SMS)" option, but that's sort of the opposite. I'd like to see "Hide plans that have a phone number" for example.
Mainly I ask because Apple-using friends of mine have told me that it's impossible to remove (e)SIM phone numbers from the iMessage database. There is apparently no setting to use to prevent Apple from making a (e)SIM phone number an option for iMessage, so it's important to have (e)SIMs that provide no phone number at all, to ensure that iMessage can't get confused about which identifiers the user actually wants available.
It does seem that your cellular is only active for an hour after you last watch an ad, which is unfortunate if you want to receive notifications throughout the day.
As such there was a really easy workaround to connect directly without using their software and bypass every restriction.
A guy I know used that workaround and at some point got a letter in the mail from them because he was in the top 1% of users of the service which was very costly to them so they terminated the account.
My hunch is even small scale abuse of a system can have a big effect. Even if it seems small it still might be impactful.
My dialup of choice was MetConnect. It was entirely free and fast no ads just dial in and use the Internet.
That gave me the key to the Caesar cipher they used for the password.. so I could create a fresh account with a scrambled password any time I wanted.
At runtime, in the OS-provided ad-free dialer, I'd use the unscrambled password.
I also pre-created some accounts with unscrambled passwords like "apple" and "bicycle" to share with friends.
NetZero* ceased operations mere weeks after I started this.. Hm.
(* Was it NetZero specifically, or some clone? I forget..)
no clue if it works to set the card up in a phone and then use it in a board?!
I think you would still pay for the full MB though.
It actually sounds terrible. I can get a minimal prepaid sim for $30/year (200MB/mo + basic voice and text) and that sounds preferable to this thing with ads.
And sure, you can pay and get a better experience, but not sure that's a fair comparison, this is free after all. If you can't afford to pay anything (sometimes people end up in shitty situations), then maybe watching a video for free internet isn't that big of a deal, when the alternative is no internet at all.
Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution?
Seriously, what is the audience here?
There are plenty of places where there are no "free wifi hotspots", like many places that fulfill the extreme "not a city" criteria. Maybe it looks differently where you live, but if I go with my car one hour inland I'll end up in places where I'm sure I wouldn't be able to just find free wifi hotspots everywhere.
> Also, if you are such a bad situation that you can not afford to pay for phone service, what is the point of having this offered as a global solution?
I don't know, ask the company if they're planning to offer a global solution and if they say yes, ask them why? Not sure how that's an argument against the service in the first place...
What is the intersection of people who "have a car and are able to drive one hour inland" and "are so cash strapped that will subject themselves to a 'free' phone service that makes them watch ads every hour"?
Also important: who would be interested in advertising to these people?
I'm talking about the people who live in those places already... The part about "if I go with my car" part is just to help you visualize that there are places outside of cities.
What I am trying to say is that, while I am certain that you can fund this useful for a segment of the population, how big this segment needs to be in order to become valuable for (a) advertisers and (b) investors willing to sink money into it?
This is a similar thing that is comparable to your eBay link, but also doesn't feature roaming. 100MB a month for 5 years, for £16 one off: https://www.rwgmobile.wales/webshop/buy-forget/5-year-sim-da...
I’m all for the effort, and I am fond of business models that more directly convey the revenue from ads to customers, but I have some concerns for this business. It all could fade pretty quickly.
At this point I laughed, as I don't have global service, yet have flown round the world in the last fortnight.
> And the value of that ad inventory of people unwilling to pay is?
Yeah, I'm never going to click on your ads. Don't build a business model on me!
Striking at the eSIM moment is a slick move, though. This would likely have been a hard non-starter in the physical SIM era (which still applies in some cases).
I bought two data eSIMs to cover my trip - each one only covered one specific country.
To my frugal mind it wasn't worth paying the extra to upgrade to a 'global' data eSIM just to cover the handful of additional places I was in transit through (and turned out I had ready access to free wifi in those places anyway).
You can buy a SIM for $5 and get a free phone number that you can only use in their app, which has ads. I know plenty of people who that service could be very useful for, $5 one-time for unlimited text/talk, if inconvenient.
I do think that using Firsty and Google Voice together could accomplish the same thing for free, except Firsty's unlock-for-an-hour model means you can't receive messages when you haven't watched an ad in the last hour, so maybe TextNow still has some use.
I can change country with $60, it doesn’t mean I’m willing to pay $10/MB. I usually can get internet service for $10 or $20/month locally.
If I haven’t sorted out an eSIM before landing, it means I’ll be without internet until I go through customs. Airport WiFi isn’t at all a guarantee. What happens if I really need internet? e.g. some overzealous immigration officer really wants to see my hotel reservation or my return flight ticket.
I’d love to have a service that guarantees I have at least messaging in 60 (ad) seconds.
For US customers, T-Mobile US went to included global roaming at EDGE speeds (email, messaging), and Verizon is at the other end with $10/Day for 2GB at high speed (dropping to “3G” speeds after that).
Any business jumping into this space has to contend with that pressure and assailability, possibly relying on less-lucrative advertising bases of users outside of North America, Western Europe, etc. That doesn’t make it impossible, but I’d certainly be interested in the upper and lower estimates for the business potential. It just strikes me as a business where the network operators are really well-positioned to extract potential value while optimizing for the defense of their position. And when it comes time to re-negotiate terms, if this business is successful, network operators in regions with insufficient competition will be able to put the squeeze on, possibly forcing unworkable costs or loss of customer trust.
I hope this works out for them, for the reason that I also think that basic connectivity should be available to all, always, but those are the business concerns that immediately come to mind.
100MB/month attached to a Pi that has data for 5 years for only £16 looks to me like a great deal for an active monitoring site.
This looks amazing. Keep it installed, use it when I land (even if just to buy a better eSIM from Airalo). Don’t need to plan ahead, shop eBay, carry extra sims around. If I cross the border for an hour (live in Canada) might just use it for texts/slow web, or pay $2 for a day. Connivence factor is amazing.
Is it just disabling your access except to a particular IP range and then enabling it back on receiving a HTTP request? Can routing in Telcos even work like that? Or is it DNS perhaps? That would seem to be the easiest layer to implement this on.
I'd really like a technical explanation here.
Why not?
I don’t know how this company actually has things setup, but I suspect you’re right — it’s all done with routing tables. DNS tends to cache too much, and I think DHCP would either be too chatty or also cache too much to be used as a gate keeper.
Instead, a firewall/routing approach would make more sense. It would technically be no more difficult than setting up port knocking. Instead of pinging a specific port, you’d watch a video. But other after that, you could just route traffic.
What I’d be more interested in knowing is where this filtering is taking place. It would be better done on the phone, to avoid null-routed data going over the network (and costing $/€/etc). So, I’m guessing that it is all done within the eSIM app itself. Maybe something like getting a (signed) token after viewing the video that extends a time limit/expiration for the eSIM itself. Then when the eSIM is expired, it can only communicate with one service — the ad host.
Simple version is the network router firewalls traffic to anything except the ad server, and the ad server will have a trigger to change the firewall. There are some technical nuances to how you handle DNS and also redirecting from other web pages (if desired) without breaking things. But that’s the gist of it.
Here is a paper on how websites could be identified for zero-rating: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343966537_Knocking_... It has a whole list of possible methods.
When your quota runs out everything you access resolves to the same address, which is an internal web site where you can buy more data.
And yes, it does not work if you use a custom DNS such as Cloudflare or Google Public DNS, or if you try to reach a HTTPS page. But they don't care, as it's a minority that does this. Android already has support for captive portals, and shows a notification when it detects one.
It's cool until you realize that it only exists to take advantage of poor people.
If the infrastructure cost was actually important, then they wouldn't serve ads in the first place.
What do you mean by infrastructure cost not being important? They either take a loss on the free plan to get downloads, the ads cover the costs and they break even, or they make a profit. All of those options seem fine and potentially sustainable to me (not sure about the loss leader though).
As for infrastructure costs, that's the entire service. How much does it really cost to provide 300kbit/s? Surely less than it costs to serve ads! Sure, you can turn a profit from the ad revenue, but that means your profit is the end user's attention.
My overall point is that we should not call ads "free". Watching ads is labor, and labor ain't free.
I have no affiliation.
The MobiMatter app that someone suggested above seems to be cheaper and also support normal 5G networks. It's been pretty reliable to me so far, i could recommend it.
Used Airalo recently on a trip to Switzerland. I think I paid 5€ for the cheapest plan and got a 3.5€ voucher that made my wife's eSIM 1.5€. Worked very well the whole time and everything was very smooth.
The standard EU free roaming does not cover CH, at least not on my plan, so I needed something like this.
I just checked Morocco, and it's $31.50 for 5GB. I think I paid 7$ for 20GB or something.
Then again, I have a phone with a regular SIM card. Maybe the prices are comparable if you have a new iPhone with no regular SIM slot and are forced to use an eSIM. In my mind, eSims should be cheaper, since there's no physical component there, but somehow that doesn't seem to be the case.
I can buy the Airalo eSIM before boarding the plane and have it readily loaded when the plane lands.
I have the feeling that this will forever be true. Local SIM usually expect that people don't use their whole quota, while eSIM will
> With travel SIMs, what you're buying is convenience.
I guess I'm not the target market here. Spending 5 minutes to get a cheaper + better deal is worth it to me then overpaying for limited data to avoid having to talk to somebody.
They want to own the whole customer journey, be able to market/upsell other products, etc. That's why they directly sell service at rates far cheaper than they will let roaming providers access.
In France there is a telco called Free, that has vending machines for SIM cards all across the country inside of various kiosks.
It’s pretty great.
I was there recently for a couple of months, and I went to one of these vending machines. Filled out some basic info about myself and paid with my debit card. The machine gave me a SIM card that I then put in my phone and have been using since.
The amount of gigabytes was decent too.
I am in a different country now, but still in the EU. Here I can still use the same SIM, but the amount of traffic that that plan gives me outside is pretty low compared to what it gave me in France. For now it’s been ok though, because here I have fiber at home. When I was in France the AirBnB we stayed at didn’t have any internet so that’s why I bought the French SIM with sufficient amount of gigas to get my work done.
Anyway, this vending machine in kiosks system is awesome. More telcos should do that in other countries too.
That's also been the case for me, but I haven't encountered a local carrier that agreed to sell a prepaid eSIM. It was always a physical SIM card, and I didn't want to swap out my home SIM because I needed to be reachable via text. (Plus: FaceTime & iMessage get reset if you do that)
I wanted to get a SIM card in Albania and they were charging €20 at the airport. After waiting for like 30 minutes for their slow-ass service of 2 people ahead of me, I just tapped 3 buttons and left the airport, getting half the data probably. I wish I had done it sooner anyway.
They are becoming a dime a dozen. Increasingly I find you can download the carrier apps ahead of time directly and keep 3-4 esims around indefinitely.
I get sufficient data for about $5/mo in just about all Asian countries this way. Most of the airports, even tiny ones, have wifi now - and it takes <5 minutes to set this up. The folks at the airport try to sell you overpriced tourist packages (or in Vietnam sometimes its a sim that fell off the back of a truck, they clone 'em) but you can just insist on an esim or wait until you're in town.
Google FI also lets you pause service for 3 months, so I turn it on for 1 day here and there and the credits roll over. I might get rid of it but it's a good backup at a known flat rate ($10/GB).
Through what was definitely a configuration error on their end, my eSIM stopped working after I added more data to my plan. So for a week, I went from WiFi to WiFi in contact with their support, while they kept asking the same questions over and over again. Is roaming on? Yes. Have you entered the correct APN? Yes. Have you tried all providers? Yes. Is roaming on? Yes ...
Eventually I called for a refund and they denied it because, despite not ever loading a single website successfully on the new plan, I had apparently consumed ~10KB.
I saw some Reddit users reporting similar issues with their support. So if you run into issues, I would recommend calling for a refund immediately rather than trying to get it fixed.
There are more than enough similar providers. I switched to getnomad.app after that.
But let's be clear: My issue isn't that their underpaid support staff didn't know what to do, it's that they apparently don't have the policies in place to just say "f* it. We don't know whats wrong. Let's refund or issue a new SIM". That would have been cheaper for everyone.
I had a Google Voice US number for almost 10 years that I lost because I could not do a verification from another US number. I verified with Twilio once as I was able to make their product work and receive a SMS from Google Voice but I couldn't make it work the next time.
I had created that Google Voice number back in the day when those SIP apps were a thing which offered you a second number. (I lived in India back then and still am).
I wonder whether there's an international eSIM that I can have without paying a regular "keeping the SIM alive" fee or paying a really really low free and recharge it whenever I want to actually use the data or SMS or calls when I need it which is usually when I travel?
Does any of these providers a retainer SIM that is kinda "pay as you go but no need to pay just to keep a SIM to receive SMS or so"? I would definitely need receiving of SMS.
i used ubigi in japan in singapore and it was really cheap and very good connectivity.
Also, being able to pre-purchase the SIM card means you can immediately browse when arriving. When we arrived, the WiFi in Chennai airport couldn't deliver the OTP to our foreign phone numbers, so without the pre-purchased eSIMs we wouldn't have been able to get internet.
I don't like it that they charge such a premium, it makes having data as a tourist somewhat of a privilege. Also, local SIMs typically offer beside data also a local phone number, which can be really helpful.
I obviously don't like that the premium for an eSIM in a place like India is so high, but I think (having a brief look at esimdb.com) $20-30 USD for 10-15 GB is not unreasonable for the substantial portion of tourists to India who are already traveling from another continent [1], and considering it's in the range (±50% perhaps) of mobile data prices for a comparable plan in the UK or the US, I'm not sure it's that much of a privilege for tourists.
To be clear, I don't mean that the premium is warranted, but just that it may not be much of a privilege for many tourists.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/207005/foreign-tourist-a...
Then we agree on that :)
For sure, it's not a big dent in ones budget for most travelers coming from other continents. The eSIM rates are indeed not that different from local rates. Looking at it transactionally, the premium is easily worth the convenience it yields.
Most of what I dislike about it is that being nearly forced to take the eSIM makes me feel more like an outsider.
Previous time I visited I did manage to get my local SIM, even though it took a couple of hours to find a store which was capable - and willingness - to issue one. This time, the regulation change caused my SIM card to get stuck in bureaucratic limbo because of new and poorly implemented additional KYC checks.
I appreciated the chore of getting a local SIM card, because it exposes you to integrate somewhat. It leads to interesting encounters outside of the normal tourist bubble, not just the people but also a bit in how their day-to-day business works. As such, I would like to be able to recommend others to try to get the SIM for themselves too.
Besides this 'stay in your privileged tourist bubble'-feeling, it also feels wrong that the premium between local data rates and the eSIM rates are that high. Even though the value-add seems minimal for anything other than skipping KYC completely and being able to pay with international credit card.
That difference goes somewhere and - I worry - that by fuelling that niche it only incentivizes the eSIM providers to lobby for borderline impossible KYC checks on local SIMs, which they can bypass for anyone able to afford that premium.
That's a hard no. That's highway robbery. 2gb/day for a month with international calling was $8 with jio
I think many places allow you to get a very good esim deal locally nowadays.
That Firsty ad stuff actually sounds horrible. You're in a beautiful country, now watch this ad every hour or go offline. No thanks, I'd prefer to go wifi to wifi then.
You're basically "roaming" on the local carrier, and your APN route you through an Airalo server. Which seems reasonable, except the server is some random OVH VPS with all the downsides of a noisy-neighbor cloud environment, and it's sometimes even all the way in the US. (Not to mention your geo IP is wrong and region-locked websites fail to load unless you find some local free WiFi. Netflix is also wonky thanks to that.)
That's fine for some countries, but in my experience, roaming with my home carrier was somehow faster & more responsive (despite the APN being all the way in Israel).
Was wondering how it can be that cheap, literally too good to be true sadly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetZero
> NetZero's model was free Internet access to attract an audience for highly targeted advertising.
Given the huge number of virtual ISPs offering eSIMs at various prices, I mistakenly assumed it would be relatively easy to find documentation on how to do that (perhaps via some ISP selling traffic bundles to virtual ISPs); maybe someone can recommend any resources?
You'd be cutting deals with the existing providers, one by one, and acting as a reseller.
A dated doc: https://www.gtigroup.org/d/file/Resources/rep/2016-12-16/2eb...
Here's hoping for a long and bright future!
There are not many actual operators that back those esim services, especially in the price conscious end.
A recent experience: get a sim that covered countries that I traveled during one trip: Singapore, NZ, USA. The operator ended up being Drei Austria and all the traffic passed through Austria which meant that:
- In Singapore the latency was high but essentially usable.
- In NZ, especially in the more remote areas it was often completely unusable even when there was cell coverage as the latency and packet loss killed all the fun.
- In NYC it was quite alright, nothing to cheer about but decent.
While in a recent trip to Japan we got a single country plan that was offered by Singtel .. traffic did a 10kkm round trip but was generally very fast.
So keep this in mind when you next buy an eSim.
https://www.keepgo.com/collections/prepaid-esim-data-bundles
I would assume not, but this FAQ feels weird: "Unlike traditional removable SIM cards, eSIMs are built into devices during manufacturing and cannot be physically removed or replaced by users".
I am not an expert, but I believe eSIM-support is essentially a feature of the modem + the OS of the device.
The eSIM itself is basically just a blob of data that serves the same function as a SIM card WRT identifying/authenticating a phone on a network.
> I would assume not, but this FAQ feels weird
Agreed, being completely pedantic, that really isn't quite accurate. The "eSIM" construct is completely manageable through software.
Both iOS and Android allow adding/removing/disabling/enabling eSIMs once they are provisioned to the device through a carrier.
eSIM: same (or similar) chip is soldered into your phone. Software is different, and allows storing the data part from multiple operators at the same time. You use your phone to switch between operators and add/remove potential operators (add part is over the internet via your phone, either via wifi or current active operator).
By way of analogy you can download new "SIM cards" to your esIM, switch between them, delete them etc. It's a feature of your phone, either it supports eSIM (has such a chip and supporting software on the phone) or it doesn't. You can't add it later.
The cost for a 30 day / 25GB sim that works in dozens of countries is $22. I think at that rate, $1.95 per day doesn't feel particularly exceptional?
Currently I am using https://silent.link since several years and I am very happy with that. For 5$ you get a eSim without any time limit and roaming in almost all networks in almost all countries. You just pay for ever MB of data a reasonable amount (not as cheap as local options, but not bad either). This is perfect as a backup eSim for traveling, even just in my own country because I can roam in all three available networks. You can only pay with Bitcoin/Lightning but it works great since 3 years or so. This is just so much better than all those travel sims which only work for 30 days in only one country...
Is it 1.95€ a day unlimited worldwide, or are there charges on top of that?
Emphasis mine.
In the app, it seems to scale between
1 day - 3.50 Euro
30 days - 59.40 Euro (1.98/day)
The pricing doesn't seem great, but also not terrible. So it could work out for them, due to convenience.
The downside: only available for purchase in the US.
Literally a 100x premium.
By US standards, Google Fi is cheap.
Not any more. I pay $25/month for unlimited text/voice/data service in the US, and there are quite a few providers that are even cheaper.
Deleting.
So the marketing claims are aspirational.
I still think it's a fascinating business. There must be a lot of number crunching going on regarding ad view rates and the most popular tourist destinations.
Which makes sense as these are not markets easily monetized, just like users who use a free ad-supported mobile data provider.
Do they mean EU+Switzerland?
There seems to be no dashboard showing how much fast data you have left.
5G is ubiquitous where I am in the UK. Yet it still connects over LTE.
Setup process on Android is very cumbersome. Is there really no API to add an esim via URL/intent?
If anyone knows something I'd love to hear it (Sweden)
I don't get it why E-sims are so crap compared to regular sims.
I really don't see how esim is beneficial to ordinary citizens. There is a plethora of downsides that can't be evaded. :/
Best of all: when you are done with it, the trojan horse can be removed from your phone.
I just signed up for the Firsty app from the UK, and the eSIM it gave me appeared to be issued by Play Poland (https://www.play.pl). This then roamed on the EE network in the UK (https://ee.co.uk).
As the SIM is roaming, there's no practical way for any KYC requirement to be enforced. This is the same as if an AT&T customer in the USA visited India (for example) and roamed onto an Indian network.
Some of the eSIM providers like Airalo do offer certain plans with KYC requirements, but that's only for a minority of countries.
I just dont' see the point of this.
starting at 1.95 a day comes out to around $57 a month..
I currently have my US number and sms via google fi and use airalo to download a data only sim, (iphone 14 dial esim ftw)
Total cost is less than this and around the same if I'm getting hot and heavy with my data usage.
the free usage tier seems interesting but again, people who can travel like me absolutely prioritze not spending time watching ads.
Is it easy to swap back and forth between eSIMs?
You can also select automatic swapping between data providers between your two active sims. Now at least that must take more power.
But how much power does a standby connection not doing anything does?
Only two sims at once cam be active btw. Voice and data can be configured seperatedly and everything works perfectly.
Note that it's not an actual subscription (although it's set by default to auto-renew), you can stop it at any time.
"Handle" what exactly?
If your phone downloads data, it will consume those 300kbit/s
Android Devices with Android 7.0 or higher should have a "Data Saver" feature (check buttons in Notification area) which can limit data-traffic to foreground apps, in case you want to reduce the amount of "data vampires". Especially helpful when abroad...
Not only do I hate this model but who the hell can afford to travel to America but can't afford 2 euro a day? Why even have an ad tier?
* It's not really free. You need to watch an ad to get 1hr? of connectivity.
* It's 1.98EUR/day, 59.40 Euro (1.98/day)
While the ability to gain some cellular connectivity without paying exists, The lack of better transparency for pricing and actual features makes it less promising.
Basic human right is not to sell your soul for pennies, but to be able to buy things you need, cheap and easy without lame border controls and obnoxious banking fees.
100% this.
And pennies is what these ads pay the company when you watch them anyways. Honestly, I would rather have a data plan that I could top up by paying them these ad pennies directly than watch YET ANOTHER ad - I get enough of those everywhere else.