Adapter lets you use cheap eSIM plans on any Android phone | Hacker News Reader

Adapter lets you use cheap eSIM plans on any Android phone

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91 pointsjosephcsible52 comments

As long as you have no requirements outside of "getting data access", then esims can be incredibly cheap.

When visiting the US I got a sim that was running on tmobile and gave me 5Gb for $4. However it was obviously using a loophole for a roaming carrier as it claimed I was on a Polish IP, which made Google convert everything to zł.

Except for that (just had to make sure I added "in $" to Google) everything worked perfectly.

You can use this sim to subscribe to Youtube, they will ask 14.99 zl instead of $4.99, that converts to $3.85 ;-)

I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium, but here it's £12.99.

Is it seriously $4.99 in the US?

I was writing about subs to channels. I'm from France btw, but I made the math with dollars. Actually it's the exact same figure in Euros, yet $1 = 0,9€

Eh, for a big portion of the past few years the USD-EUR rate has been very close to 1.

Not really. There have been few weeks in 2022, where it was close to 1, but otherwise, 0,9 for the last few years is much closer to reality.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EUR=X/

Does this still work? At least for me, YouTube now insists on a local payment method when changing countries, even on a foreign IP.

I heard if you change your linkedin location to Lebanon and then signup for a years premium it costs about $2 instead of several hundred.

> it was obviously using a loophole for a roaming carrier

I'd call that an arbitrage opportunity, not a loophole :)

JMP SIM Manager is a rebadged version of EasyEUICC available on f-droid. JMP resells eSIM card and usb reader from https://www.estk.me/product/

https://frank-ruan.com/2024/08/27/removable-euicc/

See that for more info and a comparison of the esim adapters.

Interesting point is >Their solution is not the commonly-used Eastcompeace solution. Instead, they used disassembled Apple chips. As you can see in the EasyLPAC screenshot. They used these recycled chips and re-engineered them.

> Instead, they used disassembled Apple chips.

I'd take that with a grain of salt: Desoldering eUICCs from iPhones and somehow fitting them into the Nano SIM form factor sounds prohibitively expensive!

Any chance it's actually old Apple SIMs (i.e. the physical things Apple used to ship in the SIM tray of iPads before they had widespread eSIM support)?

EasyEUICC was the codename for the app before release, yes

There are many products like this, eg:

https://shop.sysmocom.de/sysmoEUICC1-eUICC-for-consumer-eSIM...

https://esim.me/

From the article:

> While there are other eSIM adapters, the JMP adapter is the only one that doesn’t use a proprietary, closed source app.

What about managing sysmoEUICC1-C2G with EasyEUICC/OpenEUICC?

The manual mentions it includes EasyEUICC hash in an ARA-M slot, so it should work. ARA-M does not apply to OpenEUICC; as a system app, it can work with any esim.

https://www.sysmocom.de/manuals/sysmoeuicc-manual.pdf (p. 26)

The interface to configure an eSIM is standardized, there is no need to use the proprietary app. You might even be able to configure it with the software included with the phone OS.

That's not what's happening here.

The default phone OS software won't allow that. You either need a system app (like openeuicc) or a sim that has an app whitelisted so the OS will allow access (like this product uses)

These all seem quite expensive for what they are. I guess the demand is probably quite low, or are there infrastructure costs involved in supporting these?

Yeah, it's a demand thing for sure. Most of the competition is even more expensive.

How many esims does the JMP esim support? The esim.me chip supports up to 5.

There is no artificial limit, it's just down to how big the profiles are and the storage space.

With most profiles, it'll be more than 5

jmp.chat is great. besides this esim adapter, their main business - selling virtual phone numbers - is built entirely on top of open standards and open source softwares, which is definitely a rarity these days.

> JMP is $4.99 USD / month or $6.59 CAD / month, billed out of the balance on your account, for unlimited incoming and outgoing text and picture messages, and calling credit equivalent to 120 minutes of voice to the USA or Canada per calendar month [1]

Is this for real? What is the catch?

[1] https://jmp.chat/faq or see https://jmp.chat/pricing/CAD#CA

You need a separate data plan (which they do offer). It's just a fancy XMPP-based VoIP service.

Adding to this, their home page says:

> Because we use the Jabber network […]

Wait, what does Jabber have to do with sending texts and making calls on mobile networks?

They run a gateway. They have a Jabber server, you send messages to it or make calls through it, they forward the texts and calls to their upstream provider.

That's the protocol used to communicate between your device and the gateway to the phone network. Taking the place of eg SIP as a more mobile friendly solution.

Nothing. The phone number service does not use mobile networks, it uses the Internet via XMPP/Jabber. Connections to the Internet is your problem. Or buy the JMP Data Plan, which is a separate product all together.

Sounds like Google Voice vs Google Fi distinction. JMP would be Google Voice and JMP Data Plan would be Google Fi.

My Pixel can take more than one eSIM. I was not aware that this is not standard by now.

I am still with Google Fi since I was traveling a lot abroad. But now I am back in the US and see that there are much cheaper plans. Is google fi still worth it?

It seems very expensive compared to going with something like Visible or US Mobile (both get prioritized Verizon data these days) and adding eSIMs as required abroad.

Does anyone know how these eSIM travel apps work behind the scenes? There seem to be a ton of them popping up, so I'm guessing there are a bunch of services that let you white-label their offering.

They largely seem to indeed be reselling the services of a few wholesale providers, in my experience.

Some of them literally just resell local SIMs on a different storefront, but that seems to be the absolute minority.

Most of them sell eSIM profiles not "based" in the country you're actually buying data for, which I suspect allows them to effectively provide access to, and often arbitrage of, the rate carriers in the visited country would charge their users directly.

I've experienced all kinds of interesting combinations, such as receiving an ICCID from country A, IMSI and (usually) IP address from country B, while traveling to country C. (In this case, the reseller pays the provider in country B for access to their wholesale roaming rates between the visited network in C and themselves, I assume.)

Some providers actually use Multi-IMSI SIMs under the hood, which is yet another level of virtualization, allowing them to dynamically select a "home" network closer to your visited location, improving latency and the distance your data has to travel. (Truphone, now BetterRoaming, does that, for example.)

I just switched to T-Mobile because my kids all have watches that only work on T-Mobile.

It's insane what they are charging.

Is this the life hack to get inexpensive service? I see that people are recommending the xiaomi flip phone, but that's $1000+ on eBay.

Is using an esim an inexpensive way to get phone service if you don't need international roaming? That's handy, but would not be the main reason I would switch.

If the device is locked to a carrier, you can only use SIMs/eSIMs from that carrier.

If you have a phone with dual sim. Can you use 1 adapter with two subscriptions simultaneously? So that I keep my SD slot available?

no, a slot has only 1 IMEI. Even with actual e-sim you can only activate 1 at a time even though you can have more than one.

The IMEI is no longer specific to a given slot on modern phones. I have dual eSIMs on my iPhone; I believe it’s the same for newer Pixels.

Looks like a regular size sim, I don't think anything comes with anything but nano-sim slots these days.

The Xiaomi Mix Flip, which it’s supposedly pictured working with, takes a nano sim.

https://www.gsmarena.com/xiaomi_mix_flip-13221.php

It is a nano sim

This is pretty cool. Actually a lot of mid range phones don't have esim compatibility and it's extremely annoying to need to buy a physical sim.

The cost for these seems pretty high though.

The photo of the "eSIM Adapter" retail packaging, with the SIM case that's empty... seems like a little joke.

The SIM adapter is actually sitting on the top left corner of the retail packaging.

Thanks, it looked like a bad logo on the screen I was on.

I wish there was something like this for iPhones.

My Chinese / Hong Kong model takes dual nano SIM but no eSIMs

This will work on iPhone. You cannot add a profile using the sim slot of iPhone, but once the profiles are on there you can switch them find using the STK UI on iPhone. You can download using a USB reader and compatible app.

I've mentioned this before but in the US only T-Mobile allows EID-only activation. Verizon checks to see if the device IMEI matches the EID. AT&T is even worse and only allows whitelisted IMEI's on their network.

TL;DR: More useful for international travel, less useful for US domestic carriers. There's a few T-Mobile MVNO's that are cheap/free you might be able to use this with.

It’s infuriating that US carriers still cargo cult their old CDMA/SIM-less habits even in this day of 3GPP-only LTE/5G.

Sure, they can support the EID flow if they must to support whatever legacy distribution channels, but would it kill them to also support the QR-based eSIM flow like literally every other country in the world?

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