Impact
The SIM is not the problem. The flight is.
This page is the honest version. What we actually remove, what we cannot remove, what we have chosen not to buy, and why we would rather publish a small true number than a large comfortable one.
What an eSIM actually removes
A physical travel SIM is a supply chain. Polycarbonate is moulded into a credit card sized sheet, a chip module is embedded, then the card is punched into three nested sizes so it fits any tray.
It is then sealed in a blister, slid into a printed carrier, put in an envelope and driven to you. If you bought it at an airport kiosk instead, it was still trucked there, and it sat in a rack until somebody took it.
A profile download replaces all of that with a few hundred kilobytes over a connection you already have. There is no card, no punch out frame, no blister, no carrier, no mailer, no van.
There is also no queue at the arrivals hall. That is not an environmental benefit, but it is the reason most people switch. Here is the comparison, with our estimates labelled as estimates.
Plastic SIM against an eSIM, item by item
| Plastic travel SIM, posted | Plastic SIM, airport kiosk | Orbislo eSIM | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Polycarbonate in the card | About 5 g | About 5 g | None |
| Blister, carrier card, mailer | About 15 g | About 10 g | None |
| Courier leg to a person | One, to your door | Bulk freight plus your walk | None |
| Ends up as electronic waste | Yes, a chip in plastic | Yes, a chip in plastic | No new hardware |
| New hardware needed | None beyond the card | None beyond the card | None, the chip is already in the phone |
| Share of your trip footprint | Under one percent | Under one percent | Under one percent |
Weights are our estimates rather than measurements, and they are labelled that way on purpose.
20 g
plastic and card avoided per SIM, estimated
0
courier legs to deliver a profile
145
destinations served with no logistics at all
2018
oldest handset year we support, so you keep your phone
The network still costs energy
A gigabyte is not weightless. It moves across a radio mast, a backhaul link, a core network and at least one data centre. Every one of those draws power.
The honest difficulty is that published estimates for the energy intensity of mobile data disagree with each other by more than a factor of ten. Some count only the radio access network. Some include the whole operator estate. Some divide total operator energy by total traffic in a year, which flatters heavy users and punishes light ones.
So we do not print grams of carbon dioxide next to your gigabytes. A number we cannot defend under questioning is worse than no number, and this is a site whose entire argument is that we publish numbers we can defend.
What we can say is smaller and true. Efficiency in mobile networks has improved every generation. A 5G network moves a bit for less energy than a 4G network did. The emissions of your session are governed by the electricity mix of the country you are standing in, far more than by anything we choose.
The one lever we hold is waste. We do not sell you data you will not use, because unused balance stays in your wallet rather than expiring. Nobody has to buy a large ticket to be safe and then throw half of it away.
Data that never expires is a commercial decision that happens to reduce over buying. We would rather tell you that than dress it up as a green initiative.
What we do not offset, and why
We also do not run a plant a tree per order scheme. We do not have a sustainability pledge page with a photograph of a forest on it. We are not going to say we are carbon neutral.
Those three things are the standard kit for a consumer brand that wants credit without cost. Saying nothing would be quieter. Saying this is more useful.
The social side, which is where we can actually act
The part of impact we control is not measured in grams. It is measured in whether a person in an unfamiliar country can get online, get a taxi, read a map and reach somebody who answers.
- Every account carries free rescue data every month, so being out of data never means being unable to buy data
- A failed provisioning is refunded automatically, without a ticket, because a stranded traveller should not have to argue
- We refuse the sale in territories where our partners cannot deliver, rather than taking the money and apologising later
- Twelve languages at launch, including full right to left, so the throttle number is legible in the language you think in
- Support answers quickly, at every hour, because a problem abroad is time zone shaped
- Device checks run before payment, so nobody buys a plan their phone cannot install
None of this is charity
Refusing a sale in a weak market costs us revenue. Free rescue data costs us wholesale bytes. An immediate refund removes a dispute we would probably have won.
We do them because a travel product that fails you abroad has failed at the only moment it existed for.
If you want to travel with a smaller footprint
The order of magnitude runs like this. Fly less often and stay longer. Take the train where a train exists, which in Europe and Japan it usually does.
Fly economy rather than business, because the seat is the unit of allocation. Then, a very long way down the list, do not have a plastic card posted to you.
We sell the last one. We are not going to tell you it is the first.
If you are already travelling, the practical thing is to buy the amount of data you will actually use and keep the rest. Our data calculator exists for that. Our pricing page shows the rate per gigabyte falling as the balance grows, so nobody needs to over buy to get a decent rate.