Silent link esims are quite good for getting your phone to work on any country or network. I have one, not for privacy but more for better phone coverage and it works pretty well. No ID and you pay in crypto - btc/monero etc. (https://silent.link/)

For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.

>For me the main use is that I'm on o2 in the UK, but if in some dead spot with no signal I can flip the sim settings and connect via EE or whatever.

Why not just get an EE SIM if that's your main use?

Not from the UK but in Germany we have the same issue where there is T-Mobile (best coverage), Vodafone (good coverage) and o2 (worst coverage) and there are simply some remote areas where anything but T-Mobile doesn’t have coverage.

And the easy answer is that T-Mobile, or rather the parent Telekom, is a terrible company best known for right now for getting the government to agree that they can cancel your existing internet contract to make switching easier when they want to catch you as a fiber customer but actually all they’re doing is sending a marketing company around Germany (Raider Marketing) to lie to your grandma to sign contracts for the Telekom or just cancel your existing internet contract because they think with a bit of pressure they can get you to sign up with them.

Alternatively, they are also known for the worst peering on existence because they have the crazy idea that they can charge tenfold what other ISPs take for peering because they are the Telekom…

In summary, the Telekom is such a terrible company that I’d rather not give them any money and if I needed T-Mobile coverage I’d rather get a foreign eSIM and rely on roaming than giving them a single cent.

I'm happy to give them (telekom) money because their service works. Vodafone was constantly inferior in my experiences (dsl vs cable as well as their mobile networks). At least i don't have to call vodafone every month like my neighbors do when the internet is down, worth every penny.

Don't they get paid at the end when you are roaming?

It sounds like their need is to be on multiple networks. Where I live (not UK), all carriers have dead zones, some dead zones are dead for all carriers, but most aren't. Being able to use multiple networks sounds lovely.

Are you able to select which mobile network you use? At least in the US the price for tmobile is about triple that of att so it would be pretty hard to predict your spend if it switches between them without warning.

Based on this podcast episode with them it seems that you can select which mobile network or "local provider" is used. Around the 12:30 mark https://optoutpod.com/episodes/s2e13-silentlink/

> which means burners do not really exist in those places.

This is very wrong. In Germany you can go to any shady kiosk in a big city and buy a pre activated SIM card invariably registered to some Arabic or Pakistani name.

You can buy it in cash. Completely untraceable if you take care of CCTV.

Going to buy a prepaid SIM registered under an arabic name in europe is probably the safest way of getting traced by a government

Not anymore. They are more likely to go out of their way to avoid tracing you nowadays anyway to not come off as racist.

IMEI + cell tower triangulation easily makes it traceable. If the authorities want to find you, they can.

Once they know to look for you, sure, which is why you use a disposable phone and actually dispose of it before anyone has a reason to look for that specific one. That’s literally the whole point.

They might go an ask Achmed some hard questions later, but he’s long since left the country and never met you anyway.

Just track the hardware. A couple of days of normal usage and should be able to assign a 99% probability on you being the owner of that phone.

You should never turn on your burner in a place where you use your regular phone, duh.

Even using it in the same city, would only require time and maybe a bit more correlation to identify an individual.

And yet realistically you also probably don't turn it on except when you're within about 50 miles of your home.

And this is while you're flagging yourself heavily by (1) using a phone which is easily identified as a burner and (2) using it intermittently which means you're trying not to be tracked.

So you've already substantially identified yourself in any dataset.

I'm not sure how many people would get any use out of a burner phone that they need to be 50 miles away from home top use?

One of my hobbies is Recreational Paranoia. I used to have (probably still do in a drawer here somewhere) a 3G WiFi hotspot, with an Arduino and GPS module that powered down the battery within a few km of home (actually, within a few km of a public library that's a few km from home, so plotting all the power up & down locations would centre on the library not my house). I could then leave home with that in my backpack and instead of my phone take a wifi only device - I mostly used an iPod Touch but also sometimes Android tablets. I wouldn't get actual phone calls sir SMS that way, but those are both rare for me, most of my social comms are via Signal which worked just fine.

I figure wifi cellular hotspots are "not easily identified as a burner phone" and that intermittent use of them is the most common case. It would still have been able to be tracked as being a thing that turned on and off in my surrounding suburbs, and I'm sure I slipped up last least a few times and had it with me while I also had my phone with me - but like I said this was for my hobby, not running an international drug cartel or doing journalism critical of Saudi Royal houses...

I was surprised when a SIM I purchased on Amazon was not only able to connect in China but was also able to bypass the great firewall. I wonder how these travel sims get round the government regulations.

It's because the government regulations only apply to Chinese citizens. My first trip to China was back in the '00s, and I went for work. I was also surprised to find that my home SIM worked just fine there without any interference from the Great Firewall.

Roaming works somewhat unintuitively from what you'd expect. You do indeed connect to the local mobile network, but all of your data traffic is tunneled back to your home wireless provider's PoP. I realized this once I checked what websites I was visiting saw as my public IP address, and it was an address from a network in Texas!

So China's Great Firewall can't actually inspect or block your traffic while you're traveling, and using roaming on your home mobile network's SIM. It's all sent over the equivalent of a VPN to your home soil before going out to the public internet. This iswhy latency can be pretty bad while roaming.

They bypass the firewall precisely because they're roaming SIMs. Their internet connection goes through the home operator.

I imagine they simply don't allow selling such SIMs in China. It would be extremely easy to track and flag any that were e.g. used for longer than a few weeks.

I feel like there's not much of a need. The data would be quite expensive.

My impression is that people can get VPN access (and like people working in certain domains will just get VPN access through work) pretty easily in China. Though my deeper impression is most people are just fine.

You're not begging to get onto some chinese social network right?

It's how data roaming works in general -- it's tunneled through to the SIM's home provider. Conversely, a Chinese SIM roaming overseas is still subject to the Great Firewall.

They just don't enforce the exact same restrictions on roaming users. I suppose there are risks of tourists spilling the beans, so to speak, they just don't view that as a severe unmitigated risk.

When you ROAM, you traffic abroad is routed to your home country ( for security reasons among other things) and then off to the internet from there. You can check that your public IP, when roaming, is an IP from your cellco.....unsure if there are any changes with 5G though.

You are not bypassing any firewall as your traffic is actually happening at home. If you access local sites, traffic is coming from home.

Not home country, home PLMN(~=carrier). IIRC there were changes in 4G/LTE that lets the GW be at visiting carriers.

I'm suspecting that that post-4G architecture is just formalization of actual commercial deployment. Latency for roaming data was long inconsistent with the 3G diagrams, and exorbitant roaming fees that would be consistent with the diagrams also started rapidly subsiding from late 3G era.

~carrier---> cellco.

True on the Government ID document but most of the times the portal to activate would allow for any sort of numbers as long as it was in a proper format - whether or not it was valid.

These allow for self activation, have a lockout of 5 failed attempts or so and can be done via sim card codes (not SMS, but you interact with a program on the simcard and low level carrier services.)

> In many countries you need a valid government ID document to activate a mobile service which means burners do not really exist in those places.

Buying prepaid SIMs from tourists or foreign students returning home is a reasonable easy workaround for that - at least if you're the sort of person who meets and befriends those sort of people.

At least where I live tourist SIMs are restricted to 2 weeks, then need to be converted to a local SIM (with ID requirements).

And anyone leaving would have their immigration status expire and the SIM is turned off then unless you provide some other proof of residence.

Seems like an excellent business model for the homeless.

How does GrapheneOS help in that?

It doesn't specifically help with obtaining a SIM without presenting ID, but it does help make it easier to avoid later leaking your true identity to Google/Apple/etc. once you start using the phone.