Taking Your Phone to Another Country

Like Mexico, for example

Photo by Diogo Brandao on Unsplash

Conventional wisdom for getting cellular data in Mexico with your foreign (non-Mexican) phone and mobile carrier goes something like this: find your way to an Oxxo convenience store, purchase a pre-paid SIM card, and plop that SIM card into your phone. Activate the SIM card and voila - you've got local cellular data in Mexico and you don't have to pay the roaming charges that your carrier back home imposes.

I often get questions about how to get cellular data in Mexico, but I rarely offer that conventional answer (except parenthetically). What answer do I give? If you have a fairly recent model iPhone or Android phone, you can get yourself all set up for cellular data without ever visiting an Oxxo, or any brick-and-mortar establishment. In fact, you can get set up while sitting on your couch in your home in the U.S., Canada, or wherever you are. How? By taking advantage of the eSIM support your late model phone has.

The "e" in eSIM stands for "electronic". An electronic SIM is a physical component in your phone, but you don't install or uninstall it yourself. It is already part of your phone's internal hardware, and you access it via software - namely, the settings app on your phone. All iPhones starting with the iPhone XS and XR in 2018 have eSim support. Most Samsung phones have had eSim support since 2020, and Google Pixel phones have had it since about 2015. More recently, phones support multiple eSIMS. My iPhone 14, for example, supports up to 8. Normally, however, you are limited to having 2 cellular lines (each eSIM represents 1 cellular line, or account) active at the same time (that is, you can have many lines available on your phone, but only two can be active at any one time for receiving and making voice calls and for cellular data). Having 2 lines active means that you can keep your line from back home active and have a local active line in the area where you are traveling.

So how do you get an eSIM line for Mexico (or wherever you are traveling to)? Don't you need to talk to a Mexican cellular provider like Telcel or AT&T Mexico? Nope. Enterprising capitalists out there have built businesses around providing eSIM accounts for travelers all over the world. The way it works is this: these businesses have apps on the Apple and Google app stores. You download the app, and you tell it where you want service (Mexico, Italy, Singapore - wherever). The app then tells you how much you'll pay for, say, a gigabyte of cellular data. You pay for it in the app with your credit card or Apple Pay or Google Wallet, and then it instructs you on how to install the eSIM profile on your phone. Bam, you're done! You don't have to start using the eSIM until you arrive in the country you are traveling to. And, once you start using it, you can track your data usage in the app, and you can buy more data on the fly in case you start running out. It is all very cost effective, and super simple.

There are a lot of these eSIM apps out there - I've used GigSky and Airalo, and like them both. But you can just google something like "best esim apps", or you can be one of the cool kids on the block and prompt ChatGPT to tell you.

Drawbacks of using eSIM apps

The primary drawback is that you don't get a voice line - you only get cellular data. But you can always use WhatsApp, FaceTime Audio, Skype, Zoom or any number of other services for talking by voice without needing a dedicated voice line. If you are in Mexico, you need WhatsApp anyway, as it is the de-facto communication platform across all of Mexico.

Another drawback is that you are not completely anonymous when using an eSIM. If you want to be anonymous for some reason (you are a reporter working on sensitive or dangerous stories; you're a spy; you're a wanted criminal), then a pre-paid SIM card would be a better option.

But absent being Lois Lane, James Bond, or The Joker, an eSIM is probably the best option for getting your Instagram and TikTok on while wandering the streets of some foreign city.

Going further with eSIMs

eSIMs aren't just for temporary data while traveling. You can use eSIMs for your primary phone line, secondary phone line, etc. Because my business spans the United States and Mexico, I have 2 phone lines, each stored in eSIMs on my phone: one for the U.S. (Verizon), and one for Mexico (AT&T MX). Because these are lines operated by regular cellular carriers, they have voice and data - the only difference between the 2 are the phone numbers associated with each eSIM, and the fact that the AT&T MX one costs about 1/10th what the U.S. Verizon one costs. If you split your time between Mexico and some other country, getting an eSIM cellular plan in Mexico is a great idea. I chose AT&T MX because they let you do the whole transaction on their website - I never had to go to a physical store (at the time of this writing, Telcel still requires you to go to a Telcel store to get an eSIM account). When I am in Mexico, I can choose to use my AT&T MX line for voice and/or data; when I'm in the U.S. I can choose to use my Verizon account for voice and/or data. Typically what I do when I am traveling between the two countries is: when I am sitting on the plane right before takeoff, I switch my voice and data line preferences to the account in the country I am heading to; then I switch my phone to airplane mode. When I turn off airplane mode once I arrive at my destination, my phone is already set up to use the voice and data line for the account in that country. I do this all from the Settings app on my phone - it is all very simple and convenient.

Cellular Settings in the iPhone Settings app showing my US and Mexico eSIMs, and that I have Mexico set as the default for cellular data and voice.

So, if you have a later model phone, you can stop carrying that SIM ejector tool (or paperclip) with you, and you can stop fiddling with tiny little easy-to-lose SIM cards, and move on up to the carefree world of eSIMs.