Thank you. Does the e sim affect any other profiles? I mean using the e sim if you use the same phone with a regular sim at home?

No. I use my domestic sim/esim with different local ESIMs since 2019 without any issues

I’m in Scotland now and my Airalo eSIM has been practically unusable. I have signal and my phone says LTE but data just doesn’t load. I have gone back to just paying Verizon the $10/day.

curious why you didn’t choose another eSIM?

Did you try a different carrier other than the one Airalo selected? I used to have that issue with travel sims. I suspect the strongest signal or preferred carrier might be congested, and roaming sims are down the priority list for that service.

Could also be a wrong APN set by default. Happened to me once. Check if the one listed with the purchased esim in the Airalo app is the same as you see in the mobile settings. Otherwise, Airalo support is quite responsive.

Or get a sim from a different provider? esim.net worked for me last year. Lycamobile UK has some cheap eSims (I think they're on EE?).

Definitely check the APN settings. I've f;)und that that or a phone setting turning off data roaming are often the cause of this sort of problem.

This happened to me. I was looking at my latest bill from T-Mobile, and I noticed that my watch didn't have any data use over the mobile network for the last two months. :eek: I hadn't noticed because the watch will transfer data via a phone connected via Bluetooth. When disconnected, the watch was connected to the T-Mobile network just without data.

After looking at some settings, I realized that I had disabled mobile data, not just data roaming, since I spent a couple of days in the Cook Islands back in May, which is among the few locations I've visited where T-Mobile's complimentary international roaming doesn't apply. While I had the watch in airplane mode, I didn't want to take any chances in case the device accidentally came out of airplane mode.

Coincidentally, I had purchased a Vodafone CK eSIM for my mobile phone, and I remember it wasn't working upon landing. Sure enough the APN setting from the installation wasn't correct. Luckily I was still connected to the in-flight Wi-Fi since the hotel where I was staying did not have complimentary Internet access.

With an iPhone SE 2nd generation running iOS 17.5.1, I searched in Settings but could not find APN settings. Any hints on what else to call it?

Theoretically it's in Settings -> Mobile Services -> Click the SIM -> Mobile Data Network

I have indeed came across some eSIMs where that option was not there, assuming the eSIM provider is able to hide certain options.

Thanks for the response. I don't have Settings > Mobile Services at all.

Probably that's it.

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.

These performance anomalies are common in the US with the major carriers. When a location is accessed by too many native users, the service speeds suffer greatly despite the signal strength. I believe the roaming services typically default to the strongest signal despite the available bandwidth. If that carrier is overloaded by local users, your roaming lower priority will suffer greatly. Switching to another available roaming partner frequently solves the problem.

Here at home, Verizon actually offers a priority upgrade for a fee to their users, giving them first access to the available bandwidth.

We’ll my iPhone was on T Mobile high speed roaming and it sometimes connected to the same carriers as the Orange eSIM but would show different signal strength when I was away from cities.

In general I tried not to roam as much because I used up the 5 GB within 2 weeks in past trips so made sure not to update apps or podcasts unless I was tethered to the Orange eSIM hotspot.

I know that some carriers throttle their prepaid packages compared to postpaid.