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I used to be a Google Fi fan (early adopter at that) for European trips ... but nowadays, with multi-ESims, it is trivial to get a local SIM card and use that.

The local data plans are typically more broadly useable and cheaper than the $10/GB that Fi offers.

When it comes to Europe (and this might apply to other destinations as well) Fi is a bad deal.

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Definitely applies to many Asian countries as well.

Often, eSims get significantly better latency too, since you get an IP from close to where you are instead of your data having to cross one or more oceans. A VoIP call between two US SIMs/phones roaming in Asia is not a great experience.

Note that's not always the case: eSIMs I got from Nomad and Airalo in Europe/UK last year were routing things via Hong Kong, so things like DDG and google search using the SIM geolocated me to Hong Kong all the time, and the latency was noticeably bad.

If you read the reviews of some of the eSIMs there are quite a few mentions of this happening.

Definitely – you need to be aware of that when picking one. Some vendors are pretty transparent about their "IP location" these days, fortunately.

Some, like Truphone, even have multiple gateways that are dynamically selected for lower latency, which is very neat (but they're generally more expensive).

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