Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rebelgecko | Hacker News Reader

eSIM is also great for travel. There's a lot of competition on price and it's easy to check esimdb to find the cheapest carrier that meets your needs for a given trip. Download the eSIM in advance and you're good to go as soon as your plane lands

View on HN

Unfortunately there's not much competition on providing low-latency data connections, so most travel esim providers don't advertise where their connections route through. It's not great when you're travelling and all your connections to local sites get routed through and geo-located to a different continent.

Esimdb does list the endpoint location, I got burned so many times by not paying attention that now this is the first thing I check.

What am I doing wrong here, I can't find that info anywhere on esimdb?

I am currently traveling in the Philippines and used a cheap eSIM provider offering nearly unlimited data. The only problem was all the traffic was getting routed through China, and then I encountered a bunch of great firewall or geolocation restrictions. For example, Claude wouldn’t work because Anthropic doesn’t allow access to Claude in China.

Eep! I guess you do get what you pay for. I tend to stick with Airalo for that reason. It's more expensive, but there's also no monkey business like this.

Airalo definitely does not always have endpoints in the country they're selling the esim for - I contacted their support a year or so ago and their response then was that they explicitly do not give any IP address or routing guarantees or information.

True but it can be an advantage as well. Some countries highly restrict what you van do on the internet and a roaming card bypasses that. For example UAE doesn't allow calls via WhatsApp but foreigners can do it fine this way, no need for VPNs even (though a foreign roaming kinda acts like a VPN in the geolocation sense)

Bad for travel if you swap phones when you travel and have a plan that already provides data in other countries.

Why do you swap phones when you travel if your SIM is already associated with a plan that provides data there?

What are you even talking about? eSIM for travel requires to be connected to internet and in the country when provisioning. With a SIM you just pop it in. It is however nice to be able to buy an eSIM without having to wait in line at the airport, but you get what you pay for. The airport SIM is better than the eSIM from generic provider, depending on your use case, like making calls in some countries

I like that my current phone can do both, and I'll hold onto it as long as I can. Why can't we just have both options? Why do we need to keep removing features to save 2mm of space inside the phone? Oh right, it's not really so much to save space, it's to make an extra $0.01 per phone they sell.

RIP Headphone Jack RIP SD Card Slot RIP SIM Card Slot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com