Germany Travel eSIM

Germany is the country in this group where buying the SIM is not the last step. The Telecommunications Act requires the provider to collect and store a name, date of birth, identity document number and a postal address before the line is switched on, and since 1 July 2017 prepaid providers have had to check those details against a document you present. A card taken off a supermarket shelf stays dead until that identification is finished.

For a visitor the awkward field is not the passport, it is the address, and then the identification procedure itself: an app reading the chip in an identity card, a video call, or a check at a counter, each accepting some documents and not others. Residents get through it in a minute. Travellers routinely lose an afternoon to it, and that is the real argument for arriving already online.

Once you are connected, the German gap is rural and well known enough to have its own word. Regional rail lines, the Harz, the Eifel and the Bavarian Forest still have stretches where a data session simply stops, and the long tunnels on the high speed routes do the same. Your phone roams across the networks listed above and picks for itself, so a dead stretch is dead on all of them.

These plans break out in France or the Netherlands, so a German service sees a neighbouring European address rather than a German one. Expect banking apps to treat the login as foreign and public broadcaster media libraries to behave the way they do abroad. If you are moving here rather than visiting, do the identification and get the German line: a German number is what half of local life asks for, and no roaming plan replaces it.