I used to keep an older cell phone around to use when traveling. When I got to my destination, I would find a local sim with prepaid service and insert it into my unlocked phone. A few years ago with the advent of eSims I was looking for a pre-paid carrier that did not need a physical sim. I tried a couple of vendors on a few trips before finally finding Airalo in February 2020 before a trip to Scotland. I have been using them ever since and am very happy with their service. Since then I have been telling people about Airalo and sharing my referral code, DOUGLA039 to let people save $3 off their first eSIM data pack.
You have a choice of country-specific sim or a sim to cover a region. You can choose through a combination of duration and number of GB to fit your need. And it is super easy to top up when you run out. The trick is that this is data only. You do not get phone service or SMS. That’s not a problem. I am unlikely to be calling anyone in a foreign country now that most everyone has email and WhatsApp. I have Google Voice and Teams that give me domestic (USA) phone numbers anywhere connected to the Internet. So just having data is fine for me. I typically travel with my iPhone and iPad so I give them each their own data connection.
Last summer I traveled to the Netherlands with a day-trip to Belgium. I got the iPad set up with a Dutch sim that was cheaper while I got the Eurolink for my phone. The previous summer I traveled to Iceland and used the same Eurolink sim because it was the same price and already installed on my phone. I used a lot of data on my phone for those trips for navigation. All I had to do was top up the plan and go.
Setting up the esim is easy. You do have to have an Internet connection (WiFi) to do the initial connection and activation. I like to do that before I leave home on my trip so the phone is active the moment I land in the new country.
One thing I started doing last year was to use Airalo on my iPad within the US. On any given day, I am usually at home or at the office. Both locations have WiFi so there’s little need of having a data plan. I could get at $10 plan from AT&T (which actually costs $15/mo after taxes). That’s was a huge waste during the pandemic when the iPad never went outside. I could just activate the data plan when I knew I would need it. AT&T would then punish me with a $40 activation charge and charge me the $15 for any partial month used. So that week-long trip over the 4th of July could cost me over $75 assuming I remember to disconnect it. With Airalo, I decide when my activation date is and how long I want to use it. When the governor started with xenophobic rhetoric about TikTok, I was able to get a second phone for work with an affordable travel data plan.
Having an esim proved to be really useful when I traveled to see the Starship launch. We got there early to get a good view. As more and more people showed up, the cellular service all but disappeared. The lone tower of South Padre was overwhelmed. There was one guy still able to stream off the net so I ask which carrier they used: T-Mobile. So while Verizon and AT&T customers were relegated to expensive paperweights, T-Mobile was still cruising. Since I had the esim from Airalo, itself a reseller of some other carrier, I was able to roam using whatever carrier had a signal. I went into my settings on my phone and switched from Automatic to T-Mobile. Problem solved.
All of this is leading toward the question of, ‘do I actually need a cell phone?’. The answer today unfortunately is still yes. There are some banking and government functions that require you to have a cell phone. I recently had an experience with texas.gov where the registration process had phone number as a required field with no option to skip over it. I’ve recently been looking at Nokia phones wondering if I could live with one as my primary mobile device. It’s really tempting. It’s even more complicated with cell phone providers no longer breaking out data or offering basic line options.
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