Not today, Bell!

I'm back from 9 days in Tokyo, and can report great success with a pair of Ubigi eSIMs, installed on an unlocked Pixel 4a and 6a.

I set up both phones before we left, and switched the APN info right before we took off from Toronto. When we landed, my girlfriend's 4a connected almost immediately, and my 6a quickly followed after a restart. By the time our plane reached its arrival gate we were both good to go.

One added perk that I didn't realize about eSIMs is that you can use them simultaneously with your home network. Since incoming texts are free even while roaming, I was able to see a message from a family member and respond by email — using the much cheaper data provided by Ubigi.



Some random speed tests conducted during my trip. Service was 4G rather than 5G but speeds were perfectly fine, even for real-time navigation. The few low numbers above were almost all recorded at Narita Airport.



Our 10 GB each turned out to be plenty for 9 days abroad. We did connect our phones to the hotel's WiFi but probably didn't need to.

I chose Ubigi for this trip based on recommendations from reddit. For other destinations you can consult the esimdb and get the best/cheapest data for where you want to go. Another perk of eSIMs is that you can install multiple profiles (depending on your device), even if only one can be active at a time.

My brother's family also visited Japan earlier this year, and paid their provider's "roam like home" rate of $16 CAD per device per day — almost ten times what we paid per device with an eSIM. It was pretty great to not be ripped off by a Canadian carrier for once!

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Andrew Currie has been blogging about mobile phones since 2001, smartphones (depending on how you define them) since 2002 and smartwatches since 2014.
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