Comment by theothertimcook 3 days ago
In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places.
Unless you bought a pixel, graphene’d it and then paid a homeless person to activate a pre-paid data only sim which you would top up with vouchers paid in cash and used a von and international voip service…
A lot of effort though
>For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.
Why not just get an EE SIM if that's your main use?
Not from the UK but in Germany we have the same issue where there is T-Mobile (best coverage), Vodafone (good coverage) and o2 (worst coverage) and there are simply some remote areas where anything but T-Mobile doesn’t have coverage.
And the easy answer is that T-Mobile, or rather the parent Telekom, is a terrible company best known for right now for getting the government to agree that they can cancel your existing internet contract to make switching easier when they want to catch you as a fiber customer but actually all they’re doing is sending a marketing company around Germany (Raider Marketing) to lie to your grandma to sign contracts for the Telekom or just cancel your existing internet contract because they think with a bit of pressure they can get you to sign up with them.
Alternatively, they are also known for the worst peering on existence because they have the crazy idea that they can charge tenfold what other ISPs take for peering because they are the Telekom…
In summary, the Telekom is such a terrible company that I’d rather not give them any money and if I needed T-Mobile coverage I’d rather get a foreign eSIM and rely on roaming than giving them a single cent.
I'm happy to give them (telekom) money because their service works. Vodafone was constantly inferior in my experiences (dsl vs cable as well as their mobile networks). At least i don't have to call vodafone every month like my neighbors do when the internet is down, worth every penny.
True on the Government ID document but most of the times the portal to activate would allow for any sort of numbers as long as it was in a proper format - whether or not it was valid.
These allow for self activation, have a lockout of 5 failed attempts or so and can be done via sim card codes (not SMS, but you interact with a program on the simcard and low level carrier services.)
I was surprised when a SIM I purchased on Amazon was not only able to connect in China but was also able to bypass the great firewall. I wonder how these travel sims get round the government regulations.
It's because the government regulations only apply to Chinese citizens. My first trip to China was back in the '00s, and I went for work. I was also surprised to find that my home SIM worked just fine there without any interference from the Great Firewall.
Roaming works somewhat unintuitively from what you'd expect. You do indeed connect to the local mobile network, but all of your data traffic is tunneled back to your home wireless provider's PoP. I realized this once I checked what websites I was visiting saw as my public IP address, and it was an address from a network in Texas!
So China's Great Firewall can't actually inspect or block your traffic while you're traveling, and using roaming on your home mobile network's SIM. It's all sent over the equivalent of a VPN to your home soil before going out to the public internet. This iswhy latency can be pretty bad while roaming.
When you ROAM, you traffic abroad is routed to your home country ( for security reasons among other things) and then off to the internet from there. You can check that your public IP, when roaming, is an IP from your cellco.....unsure if there are any changes with 5G though.
You are not bypassing any firewall as your traffic is actually happening at home. If you access local sites, traffic is coming from home.
> which means burners do not really exist in those places.
This is very wrong. In Germany you can go to any shady kiosk in a big city and buy a pre activated SIM card invariably registered to some Arabic or Pakistani name.
You can buy it in cash. Completely untraceable if you take care of CCTV.
Once they know to look for you, sure, which is why you use a disposable phone and actually dispose of it before anyone has a reason to look for that specific one. That’s literally the whole point.
They might go an ask Achmed some hard questions later, but he’s long since left the country and never met you anyway.
Silent link esims are quite good for getting your phone to work on any country or network. I have one, not for privacy but more for better phone coverage and it works pretty well. No ID and you pay in crypto - btc/monero etc. (https://silent.link/)
For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.