My wife and I are heading to Japan in a couple of days to stay with friends and we're just staying to think about whether an e-sim or a general sim is best?
We won't need data/ calls all the time, but will need it when we won't be with our friends. Any help is appreciated!
Sim for Japan?
LNatalie on 22/12/2024 - 13:15
Comments
Thanks so much!!
I've found Eskimo pretty good if your phone can do eSim: https://www.cheapies.nz/deals/eskimo.travel#refinfo157
Use a referral code to get free data.
Eskimo is very expensive per gigabyte, not to mention you'll be paying in US dollars which is strong against NZD.
The upside is that Eskimo data never expires and it works in multiple countries, so if you frequently travel from place to place, and only staying for short periods, its more convenient in that aspectI'd also second Travelkon, great value when they're running a 20 to 30% off sale.(ozbargain.com.au)
Thanks all!
Use this site https://esimdb.com/ to compare the options but I'd also check specific reviews as the cheapest won't always be the best or most reliable. Sometimes there can be issues if you're planning to be in more rural areas instead of the main cities. However, it can also depend on what you're wanting to use data for.
An e-sim is a lot easier for the convenience and being able to enable it as soon as you land in Japan.We just purchased a regular sim in the airport when we arrived. I think it was data only.
Thanks all, we went with the Travelkon - we will be in main places and it's mostly to communicate with friends as we go between them.
No issues on our trip in Sept obviously underground and Shinkansen can be spotty but overall it was completely fine and reasonable for the price.
If it does disappoint please update the postJust got back from a 3 week japan trip with 2 different types of esim from travelkon which is pretty much all the types they sold (Docomo + Softbank). The conclusion is that it is usable. Speeds are really slow (around 4Mbps - 10Mbps) on average, even though it is advertised as 4G and LTE, its more like 3G speeds. What i noticed when I was looking around for different esims to buy, people never talked about the actual speed but rather that it works fine. If i knew the speeds were this slow, I would have purchased a sim with less data since there is free wifi at all the hotels and airbnb + shinkansens. Ended up using less than 10GB for a 3 week trip instead of the 50GB i purchased. Just for comparison, im getting around 84Mbps avg in NZ with 4G LTE. The slower speed in Japan is fine for your usual tourist stuff like, messaging, calls, GPS, Spotify and maybe some casual youtube. But if you were expecting to upload large amounts of video / photo to your cloud storage on the go, then that is going to be very painful since that was what i expected to do with purchasing all that data. The upload speed is a lot worse than the download speed.
You can't get calling/text plan in Japan without an address anyway. People just use Line, their equivalent of Facebook Messenger.
E sim is the cheapest, but you can get data only sim cards from the vending machines in most international airports in Japan like Narita, Haneda, KIX etc. It's about $40 for 10GB or so for 30 days.I have found trip.com also sales esim which is much cheaper compared to other companies. Has anyone used their services? https://www.trip.com/sale/w/10229/esim.html?locale=en-XX&cur…
We're there now, and with the sale for 10gb for $10, it would last a month but we're only here 12 days. It's heaps for us, no way we'd use it all.
Setting up in the airport was confusing, but since then it's worked as it should.Thanks mdsl32!
E-sim will certainly be more convenient and cheaper.
Travelkon is good few deals out there.
Airalo is also fine but routes it's IP address to Singapore so websites will think you are in Singapore not Japan
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/885044