Review: Singapore Airlines Exclusive Global Roaming eSIM for 118 Countries (via Pelago, by Frewie)

The travel eSIM market continues to boil with more and more options available by the day, many seeking to differentiate themselves. The market itself can be rather confusing and opaque, with a large range of brands offering them, but often coming from fewer companies who actually provide the service, who often just resell services from others. As a result, it might be wise to learn more about the eSIMs on the market, from the comfort of home, hence my recent dive into these travel eSIMs.

I was alerted to this eSIM thanks to KayDat of OzBargain, where you can get a “Singapore Airlines Exclusive: Global Roaming eSIM for 118 countries” – 1GB for free or 2GB for KrisFlyer members with coupon code. While I wasn’t going to sign up for KrisFlye…

Purchase

This eSIM can be purchased through Pelago, another online travel marketplace similar to Klook, but operated by Singapore Airlines.

To buy an eSIM requires making a “booking” which can be slightly confusing at first. The date you select isn’t very important at this stage. The two options – 1GB for everyone, 2GB for KrisFlyer members, are visible with the latter requiring a login. At least, they’re up-front about who powers the service – a company called Frewie.

Looking further down the booking page, the network partners are listed and Australia has Vodafone listed. We’ll see if this is the case, but alas, they would be the least preferable (generally speaking), although the gap has narrowed given Vodafone’s recent agreement with Optus for tower-sharing in rural areas, improving coverage somewhat.

To proceed with the booking requires adding it to the cart or booking immediately.

To actually complete the booking requires filling out name, e-mail and more. As I’ve never used Pelago before, I started as a completely new customer.

Trying to sign up with an e-mail address required verification. During this process (not in image), the default was to let yourself be e-mailed offers (which is probably spam) – opt out if you don’t want it.

Entering the coupon code then results in the need to provide your mobile number for verification. I suppose this is an anti-abuse measure, but some people consider this an extra hoop to jump through.

But wait! We’re not done yet! Despite it being a “global” eSIM, the form requires you elect your country of activation using a drop down. I believe you can tick multiple countries in the drop-down to cover multi-country trips, but this seems a little invasive. Perhaps they want to know just how much they’re going to be in for, or they’re going to use this to ensure the eSIM data pack doesn’t get accidentally activated outside the target countries.

Success at last – all the fields are filled in and we can proceed to check-out. No payment needed!

At this point, the booking is received but it seems some “handoff” is required, so there’s a bit of a time gap between ordering and Frewie getting back to you with the details. From here, Pelago doesn’t really get involved, unless you elect to buy more products (e.g. more eSIMs, or top-ups), so I didn’t bother installing the Pelago app.

Activation

As I mentioned in the last section, this service is powered by Frewie, but who are they exactly? They seem to be a travel eSIM provider, but not one I have encountered before. Their site is conspicuously free of any solid details about the company itself, but the company name ending in “Pte. Ltd.” suggests to me that it is Singapore based.

A quick check of the WHOIS information for Frewie confirms this –

So, while the eSIM is provided by a Singapore-based company, that doesn’t necessarily mean the service homes in Singapore.

Nevertheless, after a short wait, I receive a long e-mail with the eSIM and a top-up guide attached as a PDF. This e-mail goes through some of the installation instructions and gives a few important pieces of information.

The attached PDF with the eSIM is a single page. It looks as below and contains a QR code for the eSIM as well as links and manual activation text. The eSIM provisioning server is **smdp.io **which, to my knowledge, is a server operated by Truphone (now 1Global based in Netherlands), another global connectivity solutions provider.

There is also a one-pager with information about how to top-up your eSIM. This is a common ploy – a low-data/low-validity eSIM with a “discounted” top-up rate as to keep you “hooked” on their connectivity.

From what I can see, this brings you back to Pelago to book, so there’s probably some commission collected by Pelago.

As Frewie treats you as an adult technically literate person, you get the choice (and fun) of activating the eSIM manually. I prefer this process – no need for any vendor-specific apps clogging up my phone or asking for uncomfortable permissions. But perhaps this should be my quote for the year:

“Give a traveller an eSIM app, and they’ll be connected for a while; teach a traveller to install an eSIM by themselves and they’ll remain connected forever, comfortably chopping and changing between providers as they wish!”

As usual, the process involves a lot of “Checking network info…” and a couple of minutes of waiting, scanning a QR code and needing stable Wi-Fi connectivity.

Before long, the eSIM named “Frewie” is set-up and ready to be activated.

From here, the SIM needs to be turned on …

… and data roaming needs to be switched on. After this, we should be connected assuming the phone’s managed to find a network to attach to.

Testing

Testing was performed on 6th December from a location in Western Sydney with 4-5 bar access to all three major commercial 4G/5G networks in Australia using an unlocked Mediatek-based Motorola moto g54 that supports all bands used in Australia. As this card only had 1GB of allowance, I couldn’t perform so much testing of throughput or stability, but at least I was able to determine some of the other parameters.

Network

The card appeared to prefer Optus for me, with Vodafone also initially connectable. There is no access via Telstra.

Carrier Information

The above is the carrier information for the eSIM when connected to Optus. Interestingly, there’s a few differences – the bandwidth setting appears to be 30Mbit/s down and 15Mbit/s up, but it’s unclear if this is AMBR (as the phone often can exceed it). Another interesting thing is that it seems to have a voice “service” rather than not having one at all.

Based on the ICCID of 894801, this appears to be a Poland based SIM of the carrier Plus.

Looking into the IMS status, VoLTE is registered, meaning there is a voice service.

Calling myself results in a single ringback tone then the call ends with no message at all. So while there is a voice service, it is not actually usable and there was no way for me to identify my own number. While other data SIMs don’t have any IMS to register to, I suppose having one can improve the eSIM’s compatibility with certain phones.

Optus connectivity was in 5G. Connecting to Vodafone showed only 4G connectivity, but it seemed broken as I couldn’t establish a data session. In later attempts, I was not able to attach at all to Vodafone.

APN Details

Looking into the eSIM’s preconfigured APNs confirms that the APN name of “plus” is used. Based on this configuration, only IPv4 connectivity is available.

IP Address & Geolocation

IPv4 connectivity seemed to be terminated to an IP address in the 94.156.64.0/23 block belonging to Sparks Communications Ltd.

As expected, no IPv6 connectivity was available.

Further digging reveals that Sparks itself, is a travel eSIM provider behind sparks.travel. They claim to have a global eSIM “without mediation” (whatever that means) claiming to “operate like a local network anywhere in the world” (although I don’t know what this is in reference to? Legalities? Contracts?). After all, I’m in Australia yet my IP address is in UK – that’s not very local at least for me, with no convict connections.

MaxMind’s service detects the connection as a Cable/DSL connection.

But Geolocation.com has a different idea, marking it COM for “commercial services” which may result in some browsing difficulties.

Checking against a range of geolocation services shows this IP address is consistently resolved as belonging to the UK, mostly London.

Browsing

Not unexpected, the IP was causing issues with CloudFlare and some sites. Turnstile challenges appeared, but they either got stuck refusing to load or would loop multiple times with successful validations. Only after manually sending feedback did I manage to get past it – it may be the long latency affecting the loading of the challenge.

I’m sitting here in Australia, but I already feel like I’m in Europe, as I’m greeted by GDPR cookie consent banners that don’t appear when I’m at home.

Google Maps thinks I’m in London … all my searches prioritise results relevant for London, which is not ideal.

Streaming Services

If you want to stream Australian free-to-air, you’re mostly out of luck. I could get ABC iView to work with my existing account, but everyone else either presented a geoblocking message or just stalled indefinitely when starting the stream.

But being “electronically” in London meant I could sign up for a BBC iPlayer account. **“Oi, y’got a loicence for that mate?” **Um … (sheepishly) yes …

Et voila! iPlayer is playing live TV just fine … good news if you come from the UK or want to watch some BBC content. As the data was limited, I didn’t try Channel 4.

Watching YouTube was no major issue … although trying Amazon Prime Video was no dice as it wanted me to have an Amazon UK account with Prime subscription there.

Latency & Routing

In case you’re needed at work in Australia (like I’m often needed), Zoom videoconferencing might come in handy. Connected to AU cloud services …

… it seems that we’re seeing 550-590ms of latency which is very noticeable. While this screenshot shows the best-case 0% packet loss, this was only after Zoom stepped back the upload bandwidth requirement, by reducing video to 320×180 when 640×360 is normal!

Later on, in the same call, we’re seeing peak losses of 39% causing breaks in the received stream (frozen image) and stutters in audio. This connection isn’t particularly suited for video conferencing.

When it comes to gaming – Genshin Impact’s US servers saw a ping of 396ms which isn’t too bad considering the servers are about 230ms from Australia. Honkai Star Rail’s Asia servers were a very significant 594ms away – it’s usually about 200ms from Australia. The playing experience for both is noticeably laggier, but it doesn’t entirely break the game because of the nature of the game itself. Other games may not fare as well.

I ran a few traceroutes to IP addresses under my control – first hop is blurred as that’s internal. This is a VPS operated out of Sydney, showing the first two hops being the carrier’s internal NAT router. From there, Telia/Arelion carries the traffic through Slough, London, Paris, Brussels (?), Singapore where it crosses over to Vocus to carry it to Western Australia, where it takes a direct route to NSW. The round-trip latency is about 605ms for accessing a local (to me) service.

Tracing to a Vocus-based NBN service sees a very similar route with similar latencies.

Tracing to my TPG-based NBN service sees the traffic take the other direction around the world, which is a bit longer (in terms of hops). Telia/Arelion carries the traffic through Slough, London where it crosses over to Cogent to carry from London to New York, Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, San Jose, before arriving in Sydney. I’ve rarely ever seen this many hops in a trace … but the traffic still made it. I guess it’s not rush hour at the time the trace was made. The latency is similar, perhaps a bit higher, it’s hard to tell with such big jitter.

Terminating in the UK, it’s no surprise that the path to the BBC is rather short. Nevertheless, this points to the best round-trip latency being in the order of 350ms simply due to the time taken to get to the UK and back.

It would seem that there’s probably quite a few VPN or tunnels involved in this service, clamping the MSS to 1350 which is quite a bit lower than the 1420 normally achieved on a native connection. If you’re using a VPN on this connection and are suffering throughput issues, you’re going to have to clamp even lower than this, accounting for the overheads of your VPN encapsulation.

Bandwidth

Initial testing showed the service was quite promising – while initially slow due to slow-start, it ramped up to 68Mbit/s down and 24Mbit/s up. But very quickly, the connection just dropped out and came back at just about 5Mbit/s (I don’t trust the upload result here as it seems to be hanging because of some bufferbloat – there’s a lot of hops involved). Interestingly, the test saw the source IP change to Sofia, Bulgaria (193.222.98.134), part of Sparks’ 193.222.98.0/24 block.

This dropping out occurred about 500MB remaining in the card. I suspect this is deliberate ending of the session when the system detects heavy usage to allow any usage to be accounted. This way, they can cut you off when you reach your limit without much “loss” from you running over your allowance – but the downside is that your connectivity literally breaks and this means downloads may fail mid-way, calls may break annoyingly for a while until it is re-established, etc. I don’t like this, but I don’t like the capping to 5Mbit/s even more, as this defeats the “high speed” data claim.

Subsequent tests with Speedtest.net all showed about 5Mbit/s symmetrical – I missed my opportunity to complete a test before the card capped …

… because the card actually ticked over 500MB barrier just as a test was running, which showed something like 120Mbit/s down, causing the test to be aborted and the result to be lost. So if your Frewie eSIM is dropping out or not reaching high speeds, it’s probably because of this aggressive accounting behaviour.

Balance Check

Thankfully, you don’t have to install any app to check the usage, as long as you have your eSIM ID that begins with FT. You can access the page at https://usage.frewie.com/.

The usage amount is how much is used – when it reaches the full value, then the SIM will stop working with no overages. It’s not a particularly nice looking page – hardly a graphical aid to be seen – but it has the essential information.

Out of Quota

When you’re out of data, this eSIM decides to cut you off the mobile network entirely, stopping your eSIM from attaching to any network. This might seem a bit hostile but it protects the provider from any additional charges and gives you a clear indication that you’re cut-off. Let’s just hope when you recharge the eSIM that its status is reactivated, allowing you to reattach to the network …

Conclusion

This eSIM is a good example of how the travel eSIM market can be very convoluted. The eSIM is Singapore Airlines branded, sold through their own travel marketplace Pelago, but is actually offered by Frewie, a Singapore-based company. The eSIM provisioning server is operated by Truphone/1Global of Netherlands, installing an eSIM that belongs to Plus of Poland, which terminates a data service to Sparks Communications in the UK or Bulgaria (which itself, is a travel eSIM provider). Locally, it relies on Optus (5G) and Vodafone (4G)’s access network, although it seems mine locked onto Optus and wouldn’t let me back to test Vodafone’s connectivity.

This is quite the chain of companies and everything’s fine when everything works. But if there are issues, it could be quite an interesting game of finger-pointing. At least this one doesn’t terminate in Hong Kong (China) which some people may have sensitivity to. But alas, the UK is half-a-world away from Australia, so the connectivity comes with a severe latency (and potentially packet loss) penalty. Furthermore, as data gets low, the service seems to disconnect you frequently (likely for accounting reasons) and imposes a 5Mbit/s cap causing unstable connectivity. Definitely not ideal for real-time applications (i.e. voice calling, video conferencing, gaming) or accessing local Australian geoblocked content.

It works … and the speed-test initially showed quite a bit of potential (throughput-wise), but after being “capped” and only having 1GB to play with, I can’t say with certainty what the connectivity is like around-the-clock or long-term. At least, it doesn’t force you to use an app and its balance checker is rather instantaneous.