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you have to build it in with the rom or add it with a Magisk module (don't use the one on github though it's horribly out of date, if you must...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.