more on Orange eSIM, this time in Mexico

avirosemail:

How many GB did you actually use in Mexico?

Take the total amount you paid (€10.99 or USD$13.99) and divide by the actual GB you used to get your effective price/GB. If you used up all 5 GB, your effective rate would have been about 13.99÷5=$2.80/GB. On the other hand, if you only used 2 GB during your trip, your effective rate would have been about 13.99÷2=$7/GB and the balance of your 3 GB would have just expired and been wasted at the end of the 30 days.

I was a fan of Orange and had used them many times.

However, going forward, I plan to use a pay-as-you-go ("PAYG") esim, Roamless, which should work out cheaper for the way way that I travel. In PAYG plans, you pay money into a credit balance and the credit balance is only applied to the actual amount of data that you use. You do not get charged for any unused data. The credit balance does not expire if you do not use it and is retained for your future usage on another trip (or even can be used at home). The amount charged per gigabyte depends on which country you are traveling in.

For example, in Mexico, Roamless would have charged you USD$3.45/GB. Your same USD $13.99 could have bought you up to 4.05 GB of data in Mexico. However, if you used less than 4.05 GB, you would actually save money. Using the same above example, if you only used 2 GB during your trip, you would have only spent $6.90 which would have been half of what you paid for the Orange esim.

There are other PAYG plans like Jetogo and Bcengi which have even cheaper per GB rates than Roamless. In Mexico, Jetogo only charges USD$3/GB. Roamless currently has one advantage over the other PAYG; I can make outgoing telephone calls for about $.04 per minute (depends on which country you are calling). I like being able to phone up hotels and restaurants, back to Canada, etc. while traveling.

For now, I plan to use Roamless for my upcoming five country European trip in May (USD$2.45/GB). Roamless has some crazy good promos which allowed me to get 9GB of free data to use all over the world (which will expire in 6 months) just for signing up. Also, I earned some free referral credits because I helped my wife and a friend to set up their Roamless accounts. So far, I only paid $5 into my Roamless credit balance, but have earned another $15 as referral credit balance. This credit balance is non-expiring and will be saved for my future usage.

PAYG is not for everybody. If you like to spend your vacation streaming videos the whole time and plan to use 50GB in 30 days, you're much better off paying for a fixed amount data esim which would be much cheaper per gigabyte. On the other hand, if you're like me, use mostly free Wi-Fi while traveling, and only use about 2 to 5 GB of mobile data per trip (google maps, research, emails, etc. on the go), PAYG will probably work out much cheaper.

Thanks for all this info, funpig, I'm sure Forum folks will find it helpful.

The AT&T international call plan, called a Day Pass, is $12/day.

To avoid this an AT&T subscriber would have to have some version of their Unlimited Plan, let's say $40/month or more, when my AT&T prepaid domestic service costs $25/month.

This is why I wrote in the OP that the Orange travel eSIM data plan of 5GB for 30 days for €10.99 is much less than the AT&T cost.

The cost per GB for data is not the most relevant measure if you are going to be gone for, say, two weeks. In that instance the Orange data eSIM will cost you €10.99 while the AT&T international roaming on the Day Pass will cost you $168.

AT&T international roaming, if not on a day pass plan, costs $1.00 per minute in Canada and Mexico, $2.00 per minute in Europe, and $3.00 per minute in the rest of the world. Ten minutes each day of your two week south of the border vacation would be $140.

These numbers make more of an impact on my planning than seeing that a GB of data costs half a dollar less with one carrier than another.

Ten minutes each day of your two week south of the border vacation would be $140

avirosemail, I agree that what matters is not the per gigabyte, or such, but what it cost you for the whole vacation, over and above your "normal" cell plan.

Funpig is right, that it's not the per Gigabyte cost, but the actual cost for your trip. It's simpler to buy a $20 plan with 10 Gb. ($2/Gb.), but if you use a PAYGO plan at $3/Gb. that's going to cost you less if you only use 5 Gb.

And avirosemail is right that If you talk 10 minutes per day, that's a bigger deal than the data, (assuming you want to make the phone calls with your "normal" cellphone number).

Gotta read all the fine print about International Call costs. Gotta do the math. Need a spreadsheet.

Before I switched from AT&T to Tmobile, I made a big spreadsheet. I had a column for each month and a column for Data, Hotspot, Int'l Data, and In Flight. Then a yearly cost column. I entered a line for each of the different plans for AT&T and Tmobile, I didn't enter any Verizon plans as they were way too expensive.

I hardly ever make phone calls, but if I did, like avirosemail, I would have added columns for that, and for texting.

Assuming two international trips per year, I entered costs for several months of data add-ons.

Bottom line is that my ANNUAL cost for Tmobile was a lot less. Note that a few years ago, Tmobile was more complicated because only 11 countries had high speed data included. For other countries you had to buy a $35 or $50 add-on. I had to add that in. Now, all 211 countries with Tmobile get 5 Gb. high speed data, so there are no data add-ons to put in the spreadsheet.

Gotta read all the fine print about International Call costs.

Confession: I forgot about the fine print. Last month I called an Irish hotel twice from Michigan, 27 minutes total, and it added $90 to my Tmobile bill. That's because I had wifi calling activated on my phone, and it was $3 per minute instead of $ 0.25 per minute.

https://travelsims.app/country/Mexico

This website is great for compaing esims for different countries.