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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. |