I’ve replaced my physical SIM with an eSIM on my iPhone 15 in the UK. I cut and pasted the carrier instructions to manually add the eSIM. I’m now a bit baffled by the iPhone settings which I’ve had to play around with to get the eSIM to work. This is a UK virtual carrier piggybacking off a large provider. They do not provide specific carrier settings just a broad ‘add an eSIM’ instruction. These settings work - but are they the optimal settings?
My phone shows
Default voice line Primary
Mobile data; Secondary
Allow mobile data switching
SIMs
Primary data On (mobile phone number)
Secondary data On
5G data on for both
If you have an eSIM would you mind sharing your settings please?
That sounds strange. If you have only one SIM, you’d use that for everything.
At the moment I am testing another carrier’s network so I have two eSIMs installed, but if I shared my settings when I have one SIM none of those settings would apply - I’d just have everything on primary, there would be no mobile data switching (because there is nothing to switch to).
Now that I am testing the second carrier the settings you show are what I have , though the second carrier suggested not turning on mobile data switching - I decided to do so because I’m in a rural area with (as it turns out) poor coverage from both, so switching does help for me when one of them has poor coverage in one particular location.
But perhaps the carrier does something strange and installs two different eSIMs for some reason so I’d call the carrier support to confirm.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding the process but if I turn off Secondary then I lose all mobile voice and data. Leave it on and I get 5G in my locality. I’ll post in the carrier community forums and see if anyone there can enlighten me. For the moment it works - just I don’t know why.
Thank you.
That’s odd. I only see primary and secondary when I have multiple eSIMs. If I delete all the unused eSIMs all that goes away and everything gets routed over the one and only active eSIM.
Since you said you replaced your SIM with an eSIM I am assuming the SIM is no longer active. Have you physically removed it? I would expect all this primary/secondary stuff goes away as soon as the iPhone realizes you have only one active eSIM available. Perhaps removing an old non-active SIM is necessary for that. Odd, but possible.
Simon - you’ve cracked the case. It was exactly that. Took out the redundant SIM and that’s cleared it all out. Sitting in my house replying to you using 5G, Wi-Fi off and all is well. Occam’s razor I think. Thank you.
Your carrier really should have made that clearer to you.
Which one, out of curiosity? I now have two ESIMs, from different networks, that are both powered by O2 (their retail offering, and giffgaff). I use both for different purposes: giffgaff is more economical for data. But a choice to use another network, in case of an O2 outage, seems like a more sensible strategy to me.
I’m using ID Mobile who piggyback on Three. I went back to the instructions but there’s nothing there to suggest taking the old SIM out. I get good coverage, on the whole, from ID Mobile but getting hold of customer service is all done by ‘Chat’. I want to use eSIMs for foreign travel as you can buy data esims for many countries for very little beforehand. Anyway now I’ve learnt some valuable technical lessons.
Yup, awesome. I can vouch for the wonders of Travel ESIMs (currently using Airalo). They are not of course a replacement for a local SIM but they’re very convenient and you can mitigate roaming charges from the outset with a tiny bit of advanced planning. Great stuff.
If you get a Three (not ID) payg eSIM and buy a data pack, you can use their ‘Worldwide Roaming’ for free in many countries. It often works out a lot cheaper than the travel specific data eSIMS.
I didn’t know about that deal. It is a good price. ID lets me roam on the European mainland at no extra cost and it’s worked seamlessly so far from Sweden to Italy. However the Three package doesn’t include Morocco where I’m going next (nor does ID) so I’m going to try easysim.
