The eSIM We Actually Keep Using After Three Years of Full-Time Travel

DISCOUNT CODE ALERT: At bottom of page.

One of the least glamorous parts of travelling long-term is sorting data. Nobody dreams about airport WiFi, SIM cards, or standing in a queue after a 14-hour flight trying to explain to somebody why your phone suddenly won’t connect to anything.

But honestly, having reliable data changes everything when you travel as a family.

You need maps. Grab. Translation apps. Banking apps. Somewhere to check whether the ferry you booked has quietly changed ports overnight. Again.

Over the last few years we’ve tested loads of different eSIMs while travelling around Asia, and some were genuinely painful. One barely worked outside city centres. Another randomly stopped connecting halfway through a journey day in Thailand which was not ideally.

The one we’ve consistently stuck with is Billion Connect

Not because it’s flashy or because we enjoy talking about data plans, we really don’t, but because it’s been the easiest and most reliable one we’ve used.

We’ve been using it for the last three years now and, hand on heart, we’ve never had a connection issue with it.

That sounds dramatic for an eSIM review, but after enough ferry ports, delayed flights, border crossings and random apartment check-ins, you start appreciating boring reliability quite a lot.

Why we actually rate it

The biggest thing for us is coverage.

A lot of eSIMs look great when you’re sitting in a café in a capital city. The problems usually start when you’re moving around properly. Ferries. Smaller towns. Long train journeys. Islands. Border crossings.

We’ve used Billion Connect across multiple countries in Asia and it’s just worked. No messing around switching networks manually. No spending an hour turning airplane mode on and off pretending that somehow fixes everything.

We normally preload the eSIM before we even leave for the airport. Then once we land, we switch the line on and we’re connected pretty much straight away.

That part matters more than people think.

We learned pretty quickly that if you leave it until arrival, there’s always a chance you accidentally connect to your normal roaming before you’ve sorted the eSIM properly. Which is exactly how people end up with horrifying phone bills after landing for “just five minutes”.

Preloading everything before the flight removes that stress completely.

It’s also just easier travelling with Jax when one less thing needs solving after a long journey. After overnight flights everybody is slightly delirious anyway. Usually one of us is trying to find the transfer, one is keeping track of bags, and somebody desperately needs within the next ten minutes or morale starts dropping fast.