Isn't that always inherently true? With travel SIMs, what you're buying is convenience. Not to mention, some countries have annoying KYC processes for getting SIM cards/service. Presumably this bypasses that.
If I'm buying a SIM, there's a physical cost to manufacture the thing. There's no such cost with eSIMs. Also, to sell me a physical SIM, the telecom has to employ somebody to stand there and sell me a SIM. With an eSIM there's a website and it doesn't matter if 1 or 1000 people are buying SIMs at the same time. I would think that eventually the ability to scale would push the costs of eSIM down to be cheaper/the same as regular SIMs, but we aren't there yet.
> With travel SIMs, what you're buying is convenience.
I guess I'm not the target market here. Spending 5 minutes to get a cheaper + better deal is worth it to me then overpaying for limited data to avoid having to talk to somebody.
> to sell me a physical SIM, the telecom has to employ somebody to stand there and sell me a SIM
In France there is a telco called Free, that has vending machines for SIM cards all across the country inside of various kiosks.
It’s pretty great.
I was there recently for a couple of months, and I went to one of these vending machines. Filled out some basic info about myself and paid with my debit card. The machine gave me a SIM card that I then put in my phone and have been using since.
The amount of gigabytes was decent too.
I am in a different country now, but still in the EU. Here I can still use the same SIM, but the amount of traffic that that plan gives me outside is pretty low compared to what it gave me in France. For now it’s been ok though, because here I have fiber at home. When I was in France the AirBnB we stayed at didn’t have any internet so that’s why I bought the French SIM with sufficient amount of gigas to get my work done.
Anyway, this vending machine in kiosks system is awesome. More telcos should do that in other countries too.
The local provider is, locally, usually a monopoly or near monopoly.
They want to own the whole customer journey, be able to market/upsell other products, etc. That's why they directly sell service at rates far cheaper than they will let roaming providers access.
