Back in July, I wrote this post about dumping T-mobile due to their latest price increase. Since I was about to spend a few months in Europe, I felt it was the right time to dump T-mobile and try something new. I ported my number over to Tello and it has been working fine in Europe. In Europe I’ve had multiple eSims including Saily, local country eSims and a physical local sim.
Everything has worked fine. My Tello US number uses the data service from the other eSims to handle calls over WiFi and messaging. I really haven’t had any issues and I’m saving a ton of money. The eSims in Europe are fairly inexpensive. I bought 100GB month data plan in the country I’m in now and I’ve barely used 20GB and I only have one more week left, the cost was $30 for the month, way cheaper than T-mobile. Even with Tello + Europe eSim, it is still cheaper than T-mobile monthly plan!
The one thing I have discovered though is that I need a new phone. The iPhone I have is a 13 and the battery doesn’t hold charge for more than half a day. I carry a portable power bank and constantly have to recharge it. The first thing I’ll do when I swing back to the states is buy my last iPhone. I say last because I want to switch to a more AI friendly phone running linux at some point in the future. My plan is to simply use the iPhone for secure banking apps and photography and not much of anything else. In my view, the “smartphone” will become obsolete with AI agents taking over.
I’ve already downloaded the app for my next eSim in my next country. Another thing I learned is that my dual sim android phone does not support using a secondary sim for the primary sim so my second Tello number on my backup android phone does NOT work. I don’t think android supports this type of setup at all and in the future, I’ll be using two iphones with esims and Tello on both of them. My backup phone isn’t critical so I’m not rushing into buying another iphone. In a perfect world, I’ll be able to replace my iPhone 13 backup battery and use that as the backup phone.
For Asia, I know the local sim plans are very inexpensive so I look forward to using those for my month+ long stays there.
TL;DR – I dumped T-Mobile and switched to Tello and it’s been working fine all over the world so far.