When globetrotting around the world or taking a vacation, one important resource that you will most likely need is international roaming or mobile data for your phone.
Travelling abroad and using mobile data from your local carrier can be very expensive indeed.
One way of getting a cheaper mobile data plan is to buy a local SIM card in the destination country, and to replace your local SIM card with it – unfortunately this means that you will have to keep switching SIM cards to check or receive calls from your country of origin.
Nowadays however, there is a much more convenient method, where you can keep your local SIM card in your phone and install, what is called an eSIM. An eSIM is a digital travel SIM card that plugs into your original SIM card. You simply select this digital SIM card to download your data in the destination country and you can keep your original physical SIM card in your phone to receive calls and texts etc from home.
After researching digital SIMs in testing them out in different countries, we can highly recommend a company called Airalo. Please click the link below to view their website. The Airalo website is very easy to navigate, just select the country and package for place that you are travelling to, make the payment and download the eSIM.
The eSIM is only activated once you arrive at your destination country.
Some Tips For Using Airalo
Being a regular user of Airalo, here are some tips to get you up and running
- It’s better to download the Airalo app onto your phone, rather than purchase an eSIM on a computer. It makes the installation of the eSIM easier.
- Turn off your mobile data roaming during your flight.
- Once you arrive at your destination country, go into your mobile data settings and turn on the line for your country, making sure your primary line or country of origin line is off.
- Once you have turned on the destination country line, go back to mobile data and select the destination country eSIM again, this will bring up another page.
- From this page, make sure “Data roaming” is turned On.
You should now be able to surf the internet, use Whatsapp, Google maps etc using cheap data from your destination country. Once you get used to the settings, it is easy to quickly switch mobile data from one country to another.
From the above image, our mobile data is set to our primary SIM card, which is the physical SIM card we use at home.
When arriving at our destination country, we need to turn off the primary module data and turn on the eSIM for the destination country. Select the appropriate eSIM.
Do not turn on “Allow Mobile Data Switching”, as this will use data from your origin country and destination country. We really only want to use data from the destination country to save money.
Once you have selected the appropriate eSIM, make sure “Turn On This Line” and “Data Roaming” are switched on. That’s it, you should now be up and running and able to use mobile date from your destination country without having to remove your physical SIM card from your home country. You will not be charged for data usage from your home country. If you exhaust your data from your selected Airalo package during your stay, you will get an alert and you can top up accordingly through the app.
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