[4ad]

Most eSIM providers are just resellers, what I care about a travel eSIM is:

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!

[thworp]

Do you have some references for the local breakout thing (preferrably technical docs/spec)? Seems like it would not be in Telcos interest to saturate their interconnects needlessly.

[AlexAndScripts]

What is local breakout?

[4ad]

It means routing data to the Internet directly through the network the user is using rather than going to the operator's network.

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.

[AlexAndScripts]

Thanks for the explanation, that's really useful. I'll keep it in mind when travelling.

I'm curious, why Israel and Poland? Are a lot of eSIM providers from there?

[dataflow]

How do you tell if an eSIM has LBO? Also, is this specific to eSIM somehow? Shouldn't physical SIM behave the same?

[4ad]

Physical SIMs behave the same, but most people use SIM cards from specific countries rather than global SIMs, which are a niche business product not oriented towards consumers.

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.

[dataflow]

Fascinating, thanks! The NZ thing sounds wild.