That's a hard one with Telekom Deutschland. They have so many roaming partners. :o

Thanks for the guide. The locked iPhone isn't an issue due having a phone which is for the German market... My concern is the data roaming option of the usual primary sim card (which is similar to those from AT&T and VZW) as I'm only be able to switch roaming off by calling my carrier which I'm not going to do everytime I'm leaving the EEA.

settings, cellular, cellular options, data roaming can not be changed?

Can you select a different carrier?

I have no idea if this will prevent the TravelPass type plan addons from interrupting the setup.

my bad. I can do both. Will test further on Monday.

I somehow burned through my T-Mobile 5GB for the month after arriving into Japan from Taiwan. So with just a few days left, I decided to get a couple GB from Airolo which touted 5G in Japan.

Unfortunately the reality is only 4G with Airolo, based on what my phone indicates, just as it was only LTE with T-Mobile. It’s not slow, but it’s not 5G for sure.

why are people on this forum so obsessed with Airalo? Next time use Ubigi they have 5G in Japan.

I'm curious, why is 5G important while roaming? At home 4G is frequently faster due to congestion on several carriers. Are you using apps or a device that requires higher speeds than 4G will provide? I assume that the roaming agreement Airalo has with the Japanese carriers is a low priority vs. what the locals get, so any signal you receive is essentially the leftovers from what the plan holders are using. This would occur on every band, so I suspect any connection will be at that lower priority. 4G might be faster due to less congestion at any given place & time. 5G is not a guaranteed speed.

My wife and I are in Japan now using Airolo e-sims. She has Iphone 14 pro max phone and gets 5g. I have Samsung S23 and don't get 5g. My conclusion is that Apple does a better job of supporting Japanese 5g frequencies. (Note:both phones were bought unlocked versions in USA)

I had a bad experience with Airalo in Japan a year ago, but Airalo was in the process of changing its roaming partners. When we went back in January that things had improved, and Mrs. Majuki and I do remember seeing 5G signals on our S22+ phones. This was in Tokyo.

You can dial *#73# and check which bands are enabled on you Sammy. Select each SIM to view what bands are open for that SIM. If you have the appetite, you can open all the bands and get the most out of your phone.

What you see on the phone is not always accurate from a technical sense. If you want to be sure, you need a separate app and not the OS to tell you whether you are connecting to 5G or 4G. I would not worry about what the OS tells you. For all you know, perhaps both of you would have seen the same speeds. But don't go crazy testing speeds as that eats data.

I went through my 2GB Airalo data very quickly - rather oddly. I tried the Ubigi 1GB esim which showed 5G, but I couldn’t really tell the difference in speed, but my 1GB of data is lasting longer even with similar use.

Beware Global Yo!
 

Spent the last week in South Africa. At the time I went to buy an eSIM from Airalo their app wasn't working, and the website did work but wouldn't let me buy anything - so I went looking for other options.

esimdb led me to Global Yo who I've been planning to try for some time as their prices are good, so I downloaded their App, purchased a SIM, and off I went!

Or not...

Their app itself is an abomination. I'm not sure exactly what they were going for, but if the goal was to make you think you were on acid every time you open it, then they've at last mostly succeeded! eSIM's are only one part of what it does, but I'm still yet to work out what the rest is for. However on the eSIM side I was able to download and install a SIM, and after about 5 minutes it was able to connect to the VodaCom network with roaming.

However that's as far as I got. It couldn't bring up a data connection no matter what I tried. Their instructions are horrible - after some digging on their website I did find instructions that told you to configure an APN "if one is needed" - without any details of when one would be needed or what it should be set to.

After a few hours I sent off an email to their support - which in itself was a chore as there's zero details on how to contact support on their app, but eventually I found a contact detail on their website, and got an auto-reply back that one of their "ninjas" would be assigned to my issue shortly. Over 4 days later (Friday night to Wednesday morning) they finally replied to my email. By then I'd already sent a few follow-up emails, including one asking them to cancel/refund the eSIM as I'd obviously obtained a new one by them. They didn't try and diagnose my issue at all, but instead stated that they'd need a number of things in order to start the refund, including screenshots of the eSIM page in their own app showing that the eSIM hadn't been used, as well as a copy of the receipt from my payment processor for my purchase (still not sure exactly what that is). It's now Saturday and they still haven't confirmed I'm getting a refund. I'll give it a few days before I start on the chargeback.

I get that eSIM problems do occasionally occur, but between the app and their complete lack of support there's no way I'd suggest anyone ever go anywhere near these guys. In the end I picked up a physical SIM from Vodacom - 49 Rand (US$2.50) for 4GB data (2GB day, 2GB night) and the ability to recharge with larger amounts if needed. And for some reason they only charged me 20 rand for it, which made it even better!

I had a similar issue with Airalo once in HK. Could connect to the network but no data transferring. Airalo support is usually quite fast but first bothers you will all these standard questions. At the end it turned out that the default APN was wrong and I had to set another one. Then all was fine. I assume it was the same issue with your Global Yo eSIM.

BTW, I also noticed that with all these eSIM apps out there these days, most are just white labels, i.e. a provider can put their own interface but use a reseller platform. I have the feeling that Global Yo is such thing. It also does not look very trustworthy IMHO, there is not even a company name.

Because it is not really 5G. It's 4G masked as 5G. In most cases it is still roaming when we travel and use eSIM. All aggregators (Airalo, Keepgo, Holafly, etc..) have deals with some major operators in the region, and use their roaming deals to provide more coverage. Sometimes the performance on "5G" can be even worse than 4G (as phone shows)