If there’s one thing likely to put the damper on any overseas trip, it’s racking up a huge data roaming bill on your iPhone. I once managed to notch up a bill of about $40 in the 15 minutes between switching on my phone after the plane landed and organizing a local data plan while inside the airport terminal.
These days, I have a simple solution to instantly acquiring a local eSIM at a competitive price, but using this on a recent trip made me think how sensible it would be for Apple to make this a standard iPhone feature …
One of the great things about travel these days is that being thousands of miles away from your family and friends doesn’t mean you have to be out of touch with them.
From continuing the same text conversations we do in our own city to FaceTime video calls as a substitute for face-to-face contact, technology allows us to feel almost as connected when traveling as we are at home.
In the developed world, it’s entirely possible to remain pretty connected using only Wi-Fi. Almost every hotel these days includes free Wi-Fi, and we’ll also generally find it available in every coffee shop and tourist attraction we visit. Apple Maps and Google Maps also allow us to download offline maps so we can navigate without data.
But it’s still more convenient to have mobile data access available, and there are usually a number of options here:
- Pre-book a roaming plan from our existing carrier, often charged as a flat daily fee
- Use a dedicated eSIM app to buy one for our destination
- Buy an eSIM online before our trip
- Buy one on arrival from a local carrier
My own solution is to buy one through the Revolut app, as I already use a Revolut card (installed in the Wallet app) for all my overseas spending, as it gets mid-market rates with no fees.
The eSIM option is pretty well hidden! The very unintuitive pathway is to tap RevPoints. You don’t actually have to enrol (which is a paid option), but can instead tap the eSIM button beneath the Getting Started one. From there, you should be automatically offered options for use in whichever country you’re in at the time.
Provided you only switch on your iPhone when you’re already connected to Wi-Fi, you can buy one without racking up any roaming charges, and I find that the options I’m offered are always cost-effective.
However, it strikes me that it would make more sense for Apple to offer travel eSIMs directly. The company already has partnerships in place with essentially every carrier in the world, and I’m sure they’d each be delighted to offer travel eSIM deals to visitors. Offering you a choice of all the local carriers in each country would ensure that pricing is keenly competitive.
The way I’d see it working is this …
When you switch on your iPhone (or disable Airplane mode) and it sees you’re in another country, it immediately pulls up a popup window asking if you’d like to buy a local eSIM. If you tap yes, it displays all the options from all the carriers. Select one, tap Buy and the purchase is processed via Apple Pay and then immediately activated.
If the data runs out before you leave the country, another popup appears to notify you and ask whether you’d like a top-up, again showing you all the options from all the carriers.
There should be enough free usage on a default network for each country that if you switch on your phone without a Wi-Fi connection, it immediately switches to a local carrier to offer you the purchase process.
Is that something you’d like to see? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
Highlighted accessories
Photo by Opal Pierce on Unsplash
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
