Unfortunately there's not much competition on providing low-latency data connections, so most travel esim providers don't advertise where their connections route through. It's not great when you're travelling and all your connections to local sites get routed through and geo-located to a different continent.
I am currently traveling in the Philippines and used a cheap eSIM provider offering nearly unlimited data. The only problem was all the traffic was getting routed through China, and then I encountered a bunch of great firewall or geolocation restrictions. For example, Claude wouldn’t work because Anthropic doesn’t allow access to Claude in China.
Eep! I guess you do get what you pay for. I tend to stick with Airalo for that reason. It's more expensive, but there's also no monkey business like this.
Airalo definitely does not always have endpoints in the country they're selling the esim for - I contacted their support a year or so ago and their response then was that they explicitly do not give any IP address or routing guarantees or information.
True but it can be an advantage as well. Some countries highly restrict what you van do on the internet and a roaming card bypasses that. For example UAE doesn't allow calls via WhatsApp but foreigners can do it fine this way, no need for VPNs even (though a foreign roaming kinda acts like a VPN in the geolocation sense)
