About Orbislo
Nobody wants an eSIM.
Every travel eSIM on the market sells the same thing: a disposable SIM, per trip, per country, that expires. It is a 2021 product and the whole category has spent five years competing on how many countries the disposable thing covers rather than asking whether it should be disposable at all.
So Orbislo installs once and stays. Your gigabytes are a balance you own rather than a ticket that burns. There is free rescue data on every account, because being unable to buy data while having no data is the single stupidest problem in travel and nobody had bothered to fix it. And we print the carriers, the measured speeds and the throttle thresholds above the price rather than below it.
What we hold ourselves to
- We publish the throttle threshold as a number, on the buy button, on every plan
- We publish real measured speeds with sample sizes, including the bad ones
- We publish a quality tier for every country and we label our weak markets honestly
- We publish a post mortem for every incident over thirty minutes
- We tell affected customers before they discover a problem themselves
Each of those is uncomfortable, and each is the point. In a category where the top search results for every major brand include the word scam, being boringly, provably honest is the cheapest customer acquisition available.
About the data on this site
The speeds, the sample counts and the country tiers here are measured rather than claimed. They come from real customer sessions on real phones, with the location blurred to about 1 km before anything is stored and nothing published below 25 distinct devices.
The whole method is written down on one page, including what it cannot see and where it is weakest. If you are quoting one of our figures, read that page first and cite it, because every row is recomputed monthly and the number moves.
The people responsible for each area are named on the pages they own, next to the date that page was last reviewed. If a figure is wrong, there is a person to write to and the correction gets published.
145
Destinations live today
157
Upstream networks we publish speeds for
75,333
Traveller sessions behind those numbers
5
Destinations with one network only, which we label
Who measures what, and on which thresholds
One pipeline produces every speed number on this site, and its rules live in code rather than in a spreadsheet somebody keeps. A row publishes only after 25 distinct devices have contributed to it inside a rolling 90 day window.
The first 60 seconds after a device attaches are thrown away, because that is the radio ramping up rather than the network performing. Sessions that moved less than 2 MB go the same way. Location is rounded to a 1 km grid on the phone before anything is stored, so the precise coordinate never reaches us.
157 networks across 145 destinations are recomputed every month. A figure you quote in March is not the figure that stood in February, which is why every number here renders beside the date it was measured. Quote the date with the number.
Three things we will not do
These are refusals rather than features. Each one is something the category does routinely, and each one costs us.
- We do not pick your language from your IP address. Detection reads the cookie you set, then the Accept-Language header your browser sends, and nothing else. A German in Shanghai gets German.
- We do not print a star rating. There is no Trustpilot profile and no app store listing to link to yet, so a rating on this page would be a number we made up. We would rather show nothing than invent one.
- We do not expire data. Nothing in the product is engineered to be forfeited, which in this category is free margin that we deleted on purpose.
What we have not built yet
Our unlimited day pass runs at full speed to 2 GB a day and then at 1 Mbps. We want that first figure to be 3 GB and we cannot promise it, because no wholesale rate exists for it and no supplier is contracted. Maya, Airalo, Jetpac and aloSIM publish 3 GB. We publish 2 GB and sit at the bottom of that column with Nomad.
We sell no cruise plan. Nobody in this category publishes whether cruise coverage works at sea or only alongside in port, ourselves included, and we are not going to sell you something we cannot describe.
We reach 145 destinations. Airalo's global plan reaches 169. We said 200 at launch and we are not there. The gap is printed here rather than rounded away, and it is the number we most want to change.
The rules the coverage pipeline runs on
| Rule | Value | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|
| Distinct devices before a row publishes | 25 | One phone with a bad antenna is not a country. |
| Days a published row covers | 90 | Long enough to survive a bad week, short enough to catch a network going wrong. |
| Seconds discarded after attach | 60 | The radio is still ramping up. Timing it flatters every carrier equally. |
| Smallest session measured | 2 MB | Below that you are timing the handshake rather than the network. |
| Location grid stored | 1 km | Rounded on the phone. The precise coordinate never reaches us. |
Declared once in lib/measurement.ts, so this page and the method page cannot disagree.
Questions people ask about us
What does Orbislo actually sell?
Where do the speed numbers on this site come from?
Do you choose my language from my location?
Does Orbislo data expire?
Why is there no star rating anywhere on this site?
How do I report a figure that looks wrong?
Who wrote this
Jonah Reyes, Standards Editor
Checks every published claim against the source it came from and removes the ones that cannot be shown.
Responsible for
- Editorial standards across the site
- The truth report
- Corrections and retractions