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Old Oct 31, 2024 | 11:22 pm
  #975  
Adam Smith
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Originally Posted by Marschel
Because airalo usually doesn’t offer competitive packages (4G instead of 5G, higher pricing per GB eg.) compared to others like in your case.

So I‘m not sure why so many are keen to use airalo. Seems like people don’t compare these days similar to amazon when it comes to online shopping.

People should use alternatives like 3HK, MobiMatter, Ubigi etc. or in your instance Yesim. They (Yesim) have 147 countries covered plus it’s cheaper. 1 year validity of 20 GB for 64,90 USD ($3,19/GB) for existing customers or 59 USD ($2,95/GB) for new customers.
I had never heard of Yesim before coming to this thread. Until a year ago, I had just been paying my carrier's roaming charges (CAD15 per day outside of Canada/US, which is about USD12), but I was annoyed at how much I was spending on roaming and I had a trip to Zambia, which wasn't covered by that roaming plan and had early-2000s-style roaming pricing. A friend of mine turned me on to Airalo and it worked great for that trip and several others, so I kept going back without ever doing any comparison shopping.

But I had a crappy experience in Argentina recently, so I thought I'd check out alternatives for an upcoming trip to Chile. (I will cut Airalo a tiny amount of slack on this, as there was something funky with the mobile networks in Argentina, with my regular SIM constantly re-registering itself and my carrier constantly sending me roaming e-mails as though I had just arrived in the country)

But Yesim is 3x the price of Airalo in Chile. I checked a couple of places in Europe that I travel frequently, and the price is basically the same for local eSIMs (I'm puzzled why Yesim is so uncompetitive in Chile). In some places, Airalo does offer 5G. In some, no. But the Yesim website doesn't tell me what I'm getting, so maybe it's 5G, maybe it's LTE, who knows. Given I'm usually just using these eSIMs for web browsing, maps, etc, the speed difference doesn't make a big deal - if I'm in not stationary in my hotel, an airport, etc where I'm going to have free WiFi, I'm not really watching Netflix or other high-bandwidth activities.

But overall my Airalo experience has been pretty good, their app works pretty well, and I have better things to do with my time than comparison shop to maybe save 3% on an eSIM.
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