Just returned from a trip to Italy with a few days in Switzerland.

I bought the Orange Europe eSIM, 100 GB this summer for €40. I used about 35 GB over a little over 2 weeks. Could have used more but I was conservative with it in hotel rooms when the Wifi was decent enough for streaming through VPN or indoors reception was poor in some places.

As I moved around it connected to different carriers, such as TIM, WindTre and Vodafone IT or Swisscom, Sunrise and Salt.

Best speeds I got was about 350-400 down and most of the time it bound to 5G.

But it was inconsistent sometimes connecting to carriers which didn't have the best performance. For instance, I went to Bellagio on a day trip and right on the waterfront, where the ferry docks are, performance on TIM was very poor so I turned off Automatic Network Selection on my iPad and switched to WindTre, which had greater signal strength and very good performance.

I can't believe TIM would be so poor in Bellagio. Probably a quirk or maybe some carriers are throttling Orange. When I did speediest, it identified as Orange, regardless of which carrier it was on and often selected a server in France to do the speed tests.

Had a similar experience in Switzerland too. In Lugano, sometimes it connected to Salt instead of Swisscom or Sunrise, which were much better.


I'm going to 4 countries at the end of the month so I'll probably get this again, unless I'm able to get cheap prepaid eSIMs for each of those countries. Right now I don't see a better value from Airalo or Mobimatters or some of the other eSIM virtual MVNOs.