Brian X. Chen: Attention, Travelers: Now Is the Best Time to Switch to eSIM

As vacation season looms, now is as good a time as ever to bite the bullet and become familiar with a smartphone feature that many of us have ignored for years: the eSIM, the digital version of the SIM card that carries your phone number.

I will miss the ease of switching phones without getting my phone carrier involved at all, but eSIM has been a great experience for me so far.

Another thing I’ll add here is that eSIM makes it stupid simple to trial another network. I’m a T-Mobile customer, and I like the cost, but hate the service, so I was curious what Verizon offered in my area. I was able to download the My Verizon app and start at 30 trial of their service in minutes.

No walking into a Verizon store. No waiting for a SIM card in the mail. I just signed up (no credit card required, even), and was using their network on my phone in about as long as it’s taken you to read to this point in this post.

That’s awesome.

I also learned in this experience that iOS lets you use different eSIMs for different aspects of your phone. I was able to assign my new Verizon eSIM to data connections, but leave my T-Mobile eSIM active for phone stuff, so my calls and SMS messages were still coming from the number people expect from me.