Fixed data or "unlimited"? What travel eSIM plans really mean
"Unlimited" is the most common word in travel data marketing and the least useful. Almost every unlimited mobile plan — at home or abroad — carries a fair-use threshold, and past it your speed is cut to something you would not choose to browse on. The limit is still there. It has just moved off the price and into the terms. This is why our plans show a number instead.
What a fair-use policy actually does
A fair-use policy sets the point at which an unlimited plan stops behaving like one. Below it you get normal speeds; above it you are throttled, often to a few hundred kilobits per second. That is enough for messaging and not much else — maps redraw slowly, photos stall, video is gone.
None of this is dishonest by itself. Networks have finite capacity and a genuinely uncapped plan would be gamed. The problem is comparison: a plan advertised as unlimited with a 5 GB fair-use cap and a plan sold as 5 GB are the same product, but only one of them tells you so on the price tag.
How to read any travel data plan in about a minute
Whoever you buy from, four questions settle it:
- What is the fair-use threshold in gigabytes? If the page says unlimited but never names a number, the number is in the terms. Find it before you compare prices.
- What happens when you cross it? Throttled for the rest of the plan, throttled until the next daily reset, or billed for more data — these are very different outcomes.
- Does it renew? Subscription travel plans quietly bill again a month after a trip that ended.
- Is the price the total? Activation fees and taxes added at checkout are the usual culprits.
What we do instead
We sell fixed amounts of data across 6 size tiers, from £2.99 upward. Each plan states its data, its validity and one total price. There is no fair-use threshold, because there is nothing to throttle — when the data is used, the plan stops. Nothing renews and nothing bills you again.
That model is worse than unlimited in one honest respect: if you genuinely use very large amounts of data, a generous unlimited plan may cost you less. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise. What fixed data buys you is knowing the number before you travel instead of discovering it at 40 kbps in a taxi.
Picking a size without guessing
Most travellers overestimate. Maps, messaging, email and boarding passes are light — a fortnight of that is often under 2 GB. Social video is what moves the number: an hour a day of scrolling will pass 5 GB inside a week. If you plan to tether a laptop or upload photos at full resolution, budget properly for it.
Our sizes exist to be matched to that honestly, and you can always buy a second plan mid-trip. How much travel data do you actually need? works through realistic figures.
Where the price comes from
Prices update live from our network partners and are shown in your local currency where we can. The figure on a destination page is the figure checkout charges — if those ever disagree, the order is refused rather than billed at the higher number.