I am told that the great thing about an e-sim is that if say you have
a SIM + E-SIM phone (say my S23) you can have the SIM on say a
10GB/unlimited Voda contract which gives you basically free-everything
in the UK and EU, and then if you travel to say Oman, Voda would rip
you off £6/day even for trivial data, and the e-sim sorts this because
you can get an Oman-local PAYG deal onto the e-sim.

Does this actually work?

I well recall many wonderful hours spent in Greece, in phone shops,
buying a PAYG SIM, and having to show them my passport, and fill in
forms with my father's DOB and you name it. In Greece this was done to
cut down on their universal tax evasion (running a "virtual" trade off
a mobile #) but surely most of the 3rd World will be doing the same?

How exactly does one "load" a new PAYG package onto an e-sim, in some
weird country where you can't speak the language? Can it be done by
going to a website, in English?

Postman Pat <at@the-post-office-not.com> wrote:
> I am told that the great thing about an e-sim is that if say you have
> a SIM + E-SIM phone (say my S23) you can have the SIM on say a
> 10GB/unlimited Voda contract which gives you basically free-everything
> in the UK and EU, and then if you travel to say Oman, Voda would rip
> you off £6/day even for trivial data, and the e-sim sorts this because
> you can get an Oman-local PAYG deal onto the e-sim.
>
> Does this actually work?

I can't speak for Oman, but often the trick with eSIMs is there are
'international' eSIMs which just give you data and work in N countries. So
you can set this up at home, then travel to Oman and it'll roam, but at a
sensible rate (usually with xx GB included data). You don't get a local/any
phone number so you don't need to jump through whatever hoops the Omanis
make locals do.

If you want to make phone calls you can always set up VOIP over the data
connection, eg SIP or Skype, but you'll be limited to whatever country
numbers your provider offers you - may not cover Oman, and may not work if
the in-country mobile network is awful.

> I well recall many wonderful hours spent in Greece, in phone shops,
> buying a PAYG SIM, and having to show them my passport, and fill in
> forms with my father's DOB and you name it. In Greece this was done to
> cut down on their universal tax evasion (running a "virtual" trade off
> a mobile #) but surely most of the 3rd World will be doing the same?

If you want to get a local SIM with local phone number then I suppose you
need to go through the local process, whatever that is. If the local
carriers even offer eSIMs, which they may not (even the UK is pretty bad at
it, outside of contract SIMs)

> How exactly does one "load" a new PAYG package onto an e-sim, in some
> weird country where you can't speak the language? Can it be done by
> going to a website, in English?

There's usually an onboarding process which might either mean signing up at
a website (assuming you have wifi or some other data access), or buying a
physical piece of paper and scanning a QR code (maybe they will do this for
you). Since most of it happens online I assume there is either an English
version or it can be run through a translation service.

There might also be onboarding apps, it probably depends on the network.

Theo

Theo <theom+news@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

>If you want to make phone calls you can always set up VOIP over the data
>connection, eg SIP or Skype, but you'll be limited to whatever country
>numbers your provider offers you - may not cover Oman, and may not work if
>the in-country mobile network is awful.

Sure, and VOIP needs a fairly decent data allowance in itself.

Apparently the process tends to involve paying for some package and
then you are presented with a QR code which you scan from within the
e-sim config screen (android) and hey presto it just works.