When Distance Matters: Why Travel SIMs Outperform Roaming the Further You Go

by Giulio Sinibaldi and Andrey Popov

As travel becomes increasingly borderless, seamless mobile connectivity has become essential to the modern travel experience. Whether navigating a new city, working remotely abroad, or staying in touch with family, travelers expect their devices to “just work” — quickly, smoothly, and reliably.

With the growing number of global travel SIM and eSIM providers, Opensignal now set out to investigate how the mobile experience differs between traditional roaming users and those using travel SIMs (embedded or physical).

At GSMA WAS #22, Opensignal will share an in-depth benchmarking study comparing the real-world mobile experience of international travelers. The analysis reveals a clear pattern: while roaming and travel SIM users enjoy comparable experiences when traveling close to home, travel SIMs deliver consistently better performance as distance increases.
 

Roamers vs. Travel SIM/eSIM Users

In our previous analysis, we compared the performance of roamers to local users to understand baseline degradation due to roaming. We found that roamers were significantly disadvantaged compared to locals — on average spending about 60% less time on 5G, being steered onto slower 3G/2G networks, and relying more heavily on Wi-Fi as the result. In this analysis we now assess the experience of travel users, by categorizing them into two groups:

• Traditional Roamers — These are mobile users who connect to foreign networks using their home operator’s SIM while traveling abroad. Their service depends on international roaming agreements between their domestic operator and the visited country’s networks. As a result, their network access, speed, and experience are influenced by the roaming partner’s network configuration, prioritization, and commercial arrangements — often leading to reduced performance compared to local users.

• Travel SIM or eSIM Users — These are travelers who use dedicated travel SIMs or eSIMs provided by global or regional travel connectivity providers (including Holafly, Ubigi, Roamless, Flexiroam, Vodafone Travel, GigSky, Airalo, eTravelSIM, TravelWifi, N26 Travel SIM, and L2 TravelSIM). Instead of roaming via their home operator, they connect directly to local networks through partnerships or profiles provisioned by the travel SIM provider. This model can offer more localized connectivity and potentially better performance, although quality varies depending on the provider’s agreements with host networks.

   

Comparable Experience When Traveling Close to Home

When users roam within their home region (for example, Europeans traveling across Europe or North Americans visiting neighboring countries), roaming agreements between operators are typically more efficient. Latency, throughput, and consistency levels for roamers and travel SIM users are broadly similar, based on Opensignal’s measurements.

This is because, in these cases, data traffic often remains within the same continent, minimizing distance-related delays. Packet loss and jitter levels stay below acceptable thresholds, and the difference in download speeds is negligible. Essentially, the infrastructure of local roaming partnerships allows for a fairly smooth user experience.

However, this parity fades once travelers move farther away from their home region — and that’s where the benefits of travel SIMs become more pronounced.

Better Experience for Travel SIMs When Traveling Far from Home

When travelers venture further afield (say, a European visiting Asia or an Asian user traveling to South America), travel SIMs start to pull ahead when compared to those who are roaming with their home operator. Opensignal’s measurements show that travel SIM users consistently experience lower latency, meaning faster loading times and snappier responsiveness when accessing websites, apps, and video calls.

The key reason lies in how each type of traffic is routed.

• Roamers, on the other hand, usually have their traffic routed back to their home country, adding thousands of kilometers — and multiple network hops — to every data request.
• Travel SIMs typically terminate traffic locally or regionally, connecting to servers or caches within the traveler’s current region (for example, Asia or North America).

This routing difference can add several hundred milliseconds of latency. While that may seem small, the impact is tangible — leading to poorer voice and video call quality, slower app responsiveness, and delays when streaming or loading content.

In Europe, roaming users achieved latency below 1.5 seconds in 96% of tests — but this rate dropped sharply for roamers in Oceania or East Asia. For individuals travelling from Central and Eastern Asia, the performance gap widened even further when visiting distant regions, with roaming latency frequently doubling compared to travel SIMs.

Quality Degrades the Farther You Go

Beyond latency, packet loss and jitter also increase for roamers as they travel farther. For example, European roamers recorded packet loss rates under 2% when in Europe or Western Asia, but this deteriorated to around 20% in Africa and parts of Asia. These issues directly affect real-time applications like voice and video calls, causing audio dropouts and buffering.

Meanwhile, travel SIM users maintained steadier results, thanks to more efficient local routing and regionally distributed caches. This suggests that travel SIMs are better optimized for global performance, while roaming networks are still largely configured around home-market priorities.

Lessons for Operators

For mobile operators, the findings highlight an important opportunity. As global travel remains strong and demand for flexible connectivity grows, improving the roaming experience is essential to remain competitive with emerging travel SIM and eSIM providers.

The most impactful improvement operators can make is to terminate roaming traffic closer to where users are — ideally within the same region. This approach reduces round-trip times and latency while improving consistency and throughput. Partnerships with regional internet exchanges or local content delivery networks (CDNs) can help achieve this.

Ultimately, Opensignal’s analysis is clear: local or regional traffic termination is the key differentiator. Operators that adopt this approach can transform roaming from a merely functional service into a seamless experience that rivals — and even matches — the performance of modern travel SIMs.

To learn how Opensignal’s real-world data can help you benchmark or optimize your roaming experience, contact us. If you’re attending  WAS22 in Rome, don’t miss my presentation on Wednesday, 22 October 2025 where I dive deeper into these findings. 

Methodology note

This analysis is based on Opensignal’s independent measurements of real-world mobile experience collected from international travelers devices. We compared two cohorts of users:

• Travel SIM or eSIM users – Opensignal users with eSIM-capable devices connected through well-known travel SIM and eSIM providers, including Holafly, Ubigi, Roamless, Flexiroam, Vodafone Travel, GigSky, Airalo, eTravelSIM, TravelWifi, N26 Travel SIM, and L2 TravelSIM.
• Roaming users – Opensignal users who were roaming outside their home country and not connected through any of the above travel SIM providers.

Roaming users were segmented by their home region (e.g., Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas) and compared with Travel SIM users within the same destination regions.

All results reflect actual user experience, as measured by Opensignal’s proprietary methodology using billions of individual measurements collected anonymously from users’ devices under normal network conditions.