We currently have our domestic phone plan through US Mobile. We have their unlimited plan, which includes a free 10GB of international data. Before traveling, we added a new eSim to our phone for the destination. It was so simple to setup, and worked great. Maybe worth noting that it only provided data, but what do we need calling and texting for? We can do all communication over the internet.
Well, my parents are leaving for a trip to the UK, and wanted my advice about eSim. Their carrier, US Cellular, wanted to charge them $35 per phone for international use. They’re only going for a week, so $70 just to have data seems crazy high.
Both of their phones support eSim, so I recommended getting a sim with a different carrier for the trip. I learned a few things while helping them to find a reasonably priced eSim for them to purchase.
US Carrier or Local Carrier? 🔗
I wondered, first, if I could/should just get them a US Mobile account to get an eSim for travel. The answer is yes, but it’s not immediately clear how much it will cost. From the pages I could find without logging into the site, I’m not clear on:
- How much will it cost?
- Do I need a local plan to get international data?
- Do I need an unlimited plan to get the international plan?
Had these answers been more apparent, I probably would’ve stopped my search here. Instead, I turned to the search engines, which pointed me toward getting a local eSim in the destination country.
It was kind of funky trying to figure out how to query something like “US mobile carrier eSim for travel to the UK”, so it ended up just being a generic “eSim for travel”, which pointed toward eSims local to the destination country. So that’s what we did.
Little side note that took me a little bit to catch onto: England is listed as United Kingdom in most places. I initially thought US Mobile didn’t support England, but it’s under United Kingdom. Doh!
Confusing terms 🔗
I found a list of the “top UK mobile carriers”, and tried to navigate their websites to find the cheapest deals. My parents are only traveling for a week, and they hardly use data, so we don’t need much. And yet, on all the top carrier sites, it was darn near impossible to find a cheap short-term plan.
Most of the carriers listed their bottom price around $15-20 for a month span with one or two gigs of data. That isn’t awful, but I know we can do better.
FYI, it was frankly a little tricky to understand what I was looking at. For example, O2 lists four options that seem relevant, and today I still can’t tell you what they actually entail, even if their names seem obvious.
- Pay Monthly Sims
- Pay As You Go Sims
- Tarrifs
- International
Pay Monthly and Pay As You Go both seem like they could work, but I couldn’t find information about questions like
- Do I need to manually cancel this at the end of the month?
- Do I have a baseline allocation of data for pay-as-you-go?
- These don’t list data, only talk and text. Where’s the data plans?
- “Free delivery to your door”, but they’re eSim? I’m not sure what I’m getting here. Is it an eSim, or are you sending a physical sim card?
The competitors were not much more helpful. I was just frustrated.
Trustworthiness 🔗
I’m a fan of MVNO’s in the US, but I know my way around, well enough, to find what networks each MVNO is using, and whether or not I can rely on them. I don’t know this for anywhere outside of the US. So I’d prefer to purchase directly from one of the primary carriers.
I did find Apple lists carriers around the world that you can purchase an eSim through. For the UK, they list esim.net for getting a prepaid eSim for international travel. That takes me to a page that lets me purchase from O2, Vodafone, and some others that are less clear about who the actual provider is. The cheapest option I found is apparently from Orange, which wasn’t clear to me last night when I was looking at this page, but now I see the logo in the corner. But why can’t they just tell me in the details for a plan that it’s Orange? If I get O2 or Vodafone, it’s more like $15ish, which is, again, reasonable, but I think we can do better.
My problem, here, is I wasn’t entirely positive who I was purchasing through. It was the same problem I had with other sites I found. I really wanted to be sure I wasn’t getting scammed, or giving payment information to an irresponsible vendor that wouldn’t secure my data properly or respond if I needed help with anything.
Where I Landed 🔗
Eventually, I found Airalo. They seem to support several countries, with small data plans for short terms, and when I click an option, they list the networks they’re providing under the hood. It also comes with an app that instructs you on what you’re doing, whate you’re signing up for, how to activate an eSim.
For my parents who want a simple and cheap solution, this is great. It means I don’t necessarily need to hold their hands after getting everything initially setup.
In the end, they had the option between 1GB for $5 for 7 days, or 2GB for $7.50 for 15 days. This is perfect. That’s all we need.
Note for the less tech savvy: you only need data while traveling. Don’t bother getting a phone number or text and talk minutes. If you’re on iPhone, just use iMessage with people that have the blue chat bubbles (not green), and use Facetime to call people. Facetime has an option to not use your video. This all uses data.
Thoughts 🔗
It shouldn’t be this difficult and confusing to figure out pricing and terms for a short term eSim. I’m grateful to have eventually landed on Airalo, but why did it need to take so much effort to find them?
Also, why don’t/can’t the primary providers show these types of short-term options? The plan we go from Airlo states it uses O2 and Three UK under the hood. It’d have been great, and I’d have felt more comfortable, purchasing directly from one of these providers.