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Comment by HenryBemis | Hacker News Reader

I live in the EU. I don't think you can get a SIM card or a home-internet-connection without of ID or Passport (if you are a foreigner). Unless you got a cafe/hotel/restaurant/neighbor and you steal their wifi you are correct - I don't think you can have an internet connection what cannot be traced back to you.

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Not continental Europe, but 3 weeks ago I bought a sandwitch, drink and a Vodaphone sim card at Dublin international, right outside Terminal 2. I paid cash for it. Came with 20GB of data. I never tried it, but apparently you can buy topup vouchers at retailers also for cash.

I converted my number to a bill-pay last week, and I had to submit proof of residence for that. I think they also asked for proof of ID (passport) and proof of residence status.

Didn't they ask you for your boarding pass? Far fetched, but it could be the reason they didn't ask you anything at the airport.

They said they were outside the terminal. So, I imagine it is like here in Amsterdam where there is an entire shopping mall outside.

There's a WH Smith in T1 in dublin that sells prepaid sims.

> I never tried it, but apparently you can buy topup vouchers at retailers also for cash.

You can, yep. We do it once a month for my partner's mum who would be considered "unbanked".

That's actually where I got my sim. So I went out of T1, and not T2 then.

This is almost correct. Most EU countries require that you register your SIM card with your ID, before using it. This was a very controversial move from the EU, taken to the European Court of Human Rights, where it was given the green light [0].

Only a handful of EU countries didn't follow through with the ruling [1]

Landline is a bit different, as you need proof of residence to contract it anyway.

[0] https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-200442%...}

[1] https://prepaid-data-sim-card.fandom.com/wiki/Registration_P...

I'm Dutch, and can walk into pretty much any supermarket to buy a prepaid sim card without identification and pay with cash.

UK isn't in the EU anymore, but here you've always been able to get anonymous pay-as-you-go SIM cards at the shop and top them up with cash. We don't even have a national ID card. If you sign up for a contract, which is cheaper, you do need to provide some proof of identity though.

SIM cards are associated with a cell tower, which is located in a population, so your anonymous card is tied to your image in any of the billions of CCTV monitors which track citizens as they move

Moving the goalposts!

Claim was "you can't get a SIM card without a passport or ID" which was disputed.

I live in France. It is very easy to get a prepaid card without any id.

In Finland you can go to any corner store to get a 300mbps 4G SIM or even 600 mbps 5G SIM and use it as your home internet in a LTE modem (which is very common)

In the Netherlands you can get a prepay SIM with no ID. I have a friend that visits for a month or so every so often and buy one then.

Last time I heard, prepaid data SIM cards were a thing, so I guess you could just get a second-hand one?

At least in Germany, you can, but it's still tied to an ID, so you'd need to find someone who's willing to sell it and potentially get in trouble. When you buy a prepaid SIM in the supermarkets, one of the first things you have to do when installing it in your phone is do some kind of ID verification, either with the digital functionality in your ID or via some app like Postident which will do a face and ID verification.

Someone should check whether the app can be bypassed by DNS, ICMP, etc.

You can either order them preregistered from ebay or your local slightly shady phone resale store. It's also likely possible (though i havent tried) to use eSim and global providers like airalo.com to get one without enforced controlled registration (unlikely that they check, specially if you register via proxy).

And lastly, especially if you live in west german you can just take a train to the netherlands and by a sim there, no registration required.

Cellphone networks are not required to support unlimited roaming within the EU, although there are some basic roaming requirements.

Prepaid data sims will not activate until you either talk to a store employee and show them your ID, or use a service online to videocall with somebody and show them your ID.

You can get prepaid data SIM (I think also regular but not 100%) without ID in at least some EU countries. And they work across the EU usually

They will work but you are at risk of the provider cutting you off for "abusing roaming" and I'm not sure if they can also sue you to recover their roaming costs. The EU cellphone network isn't integrated between different countries - roaming works the same as roaming from the EU to the USA, besides also having some consumer fairness laws.

Most of them do not even come with roaming plans. If you want roaming you need something like a >10€ recharge to activate a plan with roaming enabled.

I don't think this is true anymore. Since 2017 the "at home" roaming works in the EU. It's a bit funny around prepaid SIMs, but I'm almost certain that it's just a cap on the price of data around €2/gb. That sounds like a lot, but my carrier plan is honestly not far off that price. (£25/mo for 12GB data)

It is true, I am on such a prepaid SIM plan where I pay 5€ and get like 1000 minutes and 30Gb of data with it, plus bonuses. But it doesn't include roaming. There is a subscription plan starting at 7€/mo, also without roaming, however it provides less flexibility than prepaid. When I go abroad I change my plan to one that includes roaming and costs 15€/3 weeks. Other operators have prepaid roaming plans for 11€.

£25 for 12Gb of data would be ripoff here, unless it's roaming data.

> £25 for 12Gb of data would be ripoff here, unless it's roaming data.

EE [0] are one of the bigger carriers here, and the only ones with decent coverage where I live, this is their list of plans. You can get cheaper, but it often comes with limited speeds.

[0] https://ee.co.uk/mobile/sim-only-deals

Wow, that'a expensive. I checked my prepay plan and I'm actually getting 150Gb and 2000 minutes for 5€. No roaming though. But the EU will regulate that some day, like they did with bank wire fees.

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