Orbislo Signal
It changes network for you, mid trip.
This is the feature that decides whether a travel eSIM is worth anything at 6pm in a stadium, at a festival, or on the second day of a conference when forty thousand people are all on the same tower.
The thing nobody tells you about a bad eSIM day
When a travel eSIM goes slow, it is almost never the eSIM. It is the one network that profile is allowed to use, and that network is busy. Coverage maps are drawn for a Tuesday morning. Travellers move in the opposite pattern, all arriving in the same three districts of the same city at the same hours, and pushing the local cells into congestion exactly when you want to find your hotel.
A local resident in that situation shrugs, because their phone has a home network with priority on the tower. A roaming visitor does not have priority. Roaming traffic is scheduled after home traffic on a congested cell, which is why the person next to you on the same street is getting 40 Mbps while you are getting 2. Nothing about your handset or your plan is broken. You are simply in the wrong queue.
There is one honest fix, and it is to be in a different queue. That means attaching to a different network. Everything else, restarting the phone, toggling airplane mode, resetting network settings, is folklore that occasionally works because it forces a re attach to the same congested cell.
Why a single upstream provider structurally cannot do this
Most travel eSIM brands are not carriers. They buy wholesale from one aggregator and resell it under their own name. The profile they hand you contains one set of credentials with one home network per country, and a roaming agreement list that was negotiated by the aggregator, not by them.
That has a consequence they cannot engineer around. When you write to support because you are getting 2 Mbps in Barcelona, the only thing they can suggest is that you go into Settings, turn off automatic network selection, and pick a different operator from the list. Try it and you will usually watch it fail, because the profile has no roaming agreement with the operator you picked. Your phone shows the network. The network refuses the attach. You end up back where you started with your battery down four percent.
To move a traveller between networks reliably, you have to hold commercial agreements with more than one operator in that country, on the same profile, and you have to be able to steer between them from the network side. That is a wholesale contract problem before it is a software problem, and it is the reason we buy from more than one source in every market where more than one is worth buying.
What we carry, country by country
| Country | Default network | Alternates | Options | Failover useful |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Japan | KDDI | SoftBank, NTT Docomo | 3 | Yes |
| Spain | Orange | Vodafone, Movistar | 3 | Yes |
| Thailand | AIS | True Move H | 2 | Yes |
| United States | T-Mobile | AT&T | 2 | Yes |
| Italy | TIM | Vodafone, WindTre | 3 | Yes |
| Iceland | Siminn | None worth attaching to | 1 | No |
The default is the network with the best measured median in that country over the last 90 days, not the one with the cheapest wholesale rate. Every destination page in the store prints its own list.
What actually triggers a switch
Signal runs on the device, not in a server somewhere guessing about you. It watches four things, and it needs more than one of them to agree before it does anything, because a switch costs you a short outage and a switch for no reason is worse than no switch.
- Sustained throughput below 1.5 Mbps for 90 seconds while you are actively using data. A slow ten seconds is a lift or a tunnel, not a congested network.
- Three or more attach or bearer setup failures inside five minutes, which usually means the network is refusing new roaming sessions rather than running slowly.
- Packet loss above 4 percent on the sustained path, which breaks calls and maps long before it shows up as a low speed number.
- An alternate network in the same country that is measuring meaningfully better right now, from other Orbislo devices within about a kilometre of you.
The last one matters most. We do not move you off a bad network onto an unknown network. We move you when we already have live evidence that the other one is working for people standing near you. If no alternate is measurably better, Signal leaves you alone and tells you the truth in the app, which is that the area is congested and there is nowhere better to go.
11 s
Median time to complete a switch
8 to 20 s
Full range of switch times measured
3
Networks carried in our largest markets
145
Destinations live today
What it will not do to you
A network switch is a real detach and a real attach. For 8 to 20 seconds you have no service. If that happened during a video call it would be a worse product than the problem it is solving, so Signal defers a switch while a voice or video call is active, while an upload is in flight, and while a download is moving above 3 Mbps. It waits for a gap, and it takes the gap.
It also will not thrash. After a switch, Signal will not move you again for 20 minutes unless the new network fails outright. Two networks that are both mediocre can otherwise trade you back and forth all afternoon, which burns battery and gives you a phone that is offline every few minutes.
And it will not override you. If you lock a network in the app, that lock wins. Some people have a reason we cannot see, a work VPN that only completes on one operator, a rural house where one network reaches and the better one does not. You know your trip. The lock is one tap and it is reversible.