Why your eSIM says you are in Norway

You are in Lisbon on a travel eSIM and the bank emails to ask whether that was you logging in from Norway. Netflix has switched to a catalogue you do not recognise, Google answers in a language you do not read, and the video call to the office stutters even though the download speed test looked fine. Nothing is broken. Your phone is using a Portuguese mast, and your data is reaching the internet somewhere else.

This post explains why that happens on almost every travel eSIM, including ours, what two measurement studies found when they tested the big brands, what a foreign exit actually breaks, and a 30 second test that shows you where your own traffic comes out.

The 30 second test

Turn Wi-Fi off, make sure the travel eSIM is the data line, and open https://one.one.one.one/cdn-cgi/trace. The line starting loc= is the country of the address you are using, and colo= is the nearest Cloudflare site to it. For the owner of the address, open https://ipinfo.io/json and read the org line; a name like China Mobile International or Singtel tells you which carrier's gateway you are behind. Netflix's own help page suggests fast.com, which shows a client location under the speed figure.

Two more lines if you are curious. dnscheck.tools shows which country your DNS lookups resolve from, which can differ from the exit address and geo block content on its own. And a speed test app's ping to a server in the city you are standing in is the honest measure of how far your traffic is travelling. We ran the first two on 14 September 2026 from a UK phone on its home network and got GB and Vodafone, which is the point: at home the country matches, abroad it usually does not.

Why an eSIM in Portugal says Norway or Hong Kong

Roaming data can reach the internet in three ways, and the definitions below come from a 2024 study of Airalo's network published on arXiv and from the geolocation company IPinfo. With home routing, the operator that issued the plan assigns your public address and every packet travels through a tunnel back to that operator's gateway before it reaches the internet. With local breakout, the visited network assigns the address and traffic exits where you are. With hub breakout, a third party carrier's gateway somewhere in between assigns the address.

Home routing is the normal case. Ericsson's technology review calls it the main roaming solution for voice and data today and says local breakout for data is rarely used. A former Ericsson engineer put it more plainly on Quora: on cellular data, even while roaming, your internet provider is still your home operator, whereas on hotel Wi-Fi the hotel is your provider, which is why the bank app behaves on Wi-Fi and complains on the eSIM.

A travel eSIM is a roaming profile issued by some operator, and that operator is rarely in the country you are visiting. So the address you show the world belongs to wherever that operator, or the hub it uses, keeps its gateway. Norway, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands and Virginia all turn up in the measurements below.

What the research actually measured

The Airalo study, submitted in August 2024, bought 24 country eSIMs and tested them between December 2023 and April 2024. Twenty one of them roamed. Five used home routing through Singtel in Singapore. Sixteen used hub breakout. None used local breakout. A UK eSIM issued by a Polish operator exited in the Netherlands or France; a Turkey eSIM exited in Amsterdam; a France eSIM exited in Virginia. The same profile sometimes alternated between two hub providers from one session to the next.

The USENIX Security 2025 paper from Northeastern University tested 25 providers from the United States in August 2025 and found that in almost all cases the device's public address did not correspond to its physical location. Holafly, an Irish company, gave a Hong Kong address owned by China Mobile International. Airalo, eSIM Access, Flexiroam and Voye came out in Texas; Nomad in Virginia; Saily, Ubigi and USIMS in New York; Yesim and DENT in Poland; RedTeaGo in England; Gigsky in Denmark; MTX Connect in Oslo. Only Google Fi and T-Mobile, native carriers, showed the real location. The researchers streamed a Hong Kong only TV service from the US without a VPN.

Both results are dated. Networks reroute and hubs alternate, and one competitor that publishes its own exit list says so in its footnote. Read any provider's exit country as measured on a date, never as a fixed property of the brand.

The company's home country tells you nothing, as the Holafly, Ubigi and Gigsky rows show. Nor does the address on the QR code: the profile download server can sit in the EU while the data exits in Singapore, a trap we have fallen into ourselves.

What a foreign exit actually breaks

Bank fraud checks compare the country of your address with your card, your phone and your habits, and a home routed eSIM makes you look like you are logging in from Norway or Hong Kong. Chase says it no longer accepts travel notices, Barclays says you do not need to tell it, and Nationwide says the same; all three hold a payment that scores as high risk until you confirm it by text or app. None of their pages mentions addresses or eSIMs, so the link is inferred from what travellers report, like the r/digitalnomad poster who opened a bank account from a phone in Portugal in June 2026 and got an email asking if that was him in Norway.

Streaming follows the address. Netflix says it may think you are in a different country than the one you are in, tells you to check the client location on fast.com, and warns that catalogues and downloads vary by country and that VPNs are unsupported on its ad plans. Inside the EU it keeps an EU resident's home catalogue for a limited time; outside, you get the catalogue of wherever the exit is. Spotify's current pages say only that your account country is where you signed up and the new country only shows when you are actually there; the 14 day rule repeated on many sites is not on the pages we read.

Google picks its search country and language from the address. Its help forum's answer since 2019 is to set a region under Search settings and save it. Prices and ads follow the exit country too. And a few services care about the exit itself: MobiMatter's help centre notes that TikTok and OpenAI restrict users on Hong Kong addresses, so a Hong Kong exit sits outside mainland China's filtering and inside a couple of others. That two sided fact matters enough for China that we wrote it up in our China eSIM and VPN post.

Why video calls lag but downloads do not

Routing changes how far your packets travel, not how many arrive per second. The Airalo study found that routing type did not correlate with download speed; throughput depended on the visited operator's policy. What it changed was latency: round trips on home routed eSIMs averaged about 621% higher than on a local physical SIM, hub breakout about 64% higher, and 14.5% of eSIM samples exceeded 150 milliseconds against 3% for local SIMs. In Pakistan the median round trip was 389 milliseconds on the eSIM and 50 on the local SIM.

Geography sets the floor. Light in fibre covers roughly 200 kilometres a millisecond, so a detour of 1,000 kilometres adds about 10 milliseconds each way before any router queues. Verizon's backbone figures for August 2026 put a trans Atlantic round trip at 70 milliseconds, Hong Kong to the UK at 190 and Singapore to the UK at 156, and live pings on 14 September 2026 gave Oslo to Lisbon 60 milliseconds and Oslo to Hong Kong 216. A phone's radio link and the roaming tunnel sit on top of those.

Against that, Google says Meet quality is highest below 100 milliseconds of round trip and is reduced at 300 or more; Microsoft's guidance for Teams calls under 60 optimal and over 500 poor. A Portugal eSIM exiting in Norway costs you tens of milliseconds and is usually fine. A Europe plan exiting in Hong Kong costs a couple of hundred and is the one that makes calls impossible, which is exactly what one Reddit user described in June 2026. If your problem is speed rather than lag, it is a different problem, covered in why your data is slow abroad.

Fixes that work, and fixes that make it worse

You cannot change a roaming eSIM's exit from the phone. What you can do is route around it for the few things that care.

1. For the one bank login that insists, use the hotel Wi-Fi. On Wi-Fi the local provider is your internet provider, so the address matches the country.
2. Move bank and card codes to an authenticator app or app approval before you travel, so a foreign looking login is confirmed in the app rather than blocked. Our post on bank codes not arriving abroad covers the SMS side.
3. Set Google's region by hand under Search settings, and set app languages in each app rather than hoping the address changes.
4. Keep VPNs off when troubleshooting. A VPN adds a second detour and a data centre address that fraud and streaming filters flag; Netflix's help and several providers say the same. Use one only for a specific need, never for banking.
5. On an iPhone, iCloud Private Relay changes what a lookup site sees in Safari and has a per line switch under Settings, Cellular, tap the line, Limit IP Address Tracking. Turn it off while you test, then decide.
6. If a local exit is essential, some providers sell it: Ubigi offers a free home country address for ten countries, Saily has virtual locations that behave like a VPN, and Tunz lets you pick a network location. Nobody sells a true local exit in every country.

One more thing to leave alone. Hop counts in a traceroute do not prove local breakout or home routing; the Airalo study shows private path lengths vary by gateway provider. And geolocation databases disagree with each other, as the USENIX team found for some addresses, so check two lookup sites and trust the org line over the flag.

Where MegaEsim plans exit

Our plans are roaming profiles like every other travel eSIM, so they home route or hub route like every other travel eSIM, and the exit country varies by plan and by route. We do not publish it, because the routing can change, and a published country that turns out wrong on the day you land is worse than an honest "check". Run the 30 second test after you connect and again after any top up; it takes less time than reading this paragraph. If you need a particular exit for work, tell us the country before you buy and we will say whether we can help.

Two things we can say plainly. It is not a VPN, it adds no encryption, and it is not a security flaw either; it is how roaming has worked for two decades, and the only new concern the USENIX paper raises is which country's networks your traffic transits. And it does not change your speed. Our Europe plans cover 34 countries on one profile, and where that profile exits has no bearing on the bandwidth the Spanish or Italian network gives you.

When a home routed address is what you want

The mirror image comes up just as often on the forums. A German on a Telekom SIM roaming in the United States got a German address and was locked out of a US cinema app until he switched to Wi-Fi, which is the same mechanism in reverse. UK travellers report that an O2 SIM abroad behaves as if it were in the UK for geo blocked content. If what you want is to look like you are at home, your home SIM's roaming already does it, at your carrier's roaming price, and the eSIM's foreign exit is the thing you are trying to avoid. Pick the line for the job and turn the other one's data off.

Quick answers

Why is my IP address saying I am in a different country?

On a travel eSIM it is usually not a database error. Your data leaves the local mast through a tunnel to the gateway of the operator that issued the plan, or to a hub in between, and the public address belongs to that country. Only on Wi-Fi or a native local SIM should the country match. Databases do lag, so check two lookups and read the owner line.

How do I fix an IP address showing the wrong location on my eSIM?

You cannot change where a roaming eSIM exits from the phone. Work around it: use hotel Wi-Fi for the one login that needs a local address, move bank codes to an app, set region and language by hand in Google and other apps, keep VPNs off while testing, and if you need a specific exit for work, buy from a provider that sells a selectable one.

Does a travel eSIM give me a local IP address?

Almost never. The 2024 Airalo study found none of 24 country profiles used local breakout, and the 2025 USENIX study found almost all of 25 providers exited in a third country. Native operator profiles such as Google Fi and T-Mobile in that study, and a SIM bought from a local carrier, are the exceptions.

Why does my banking app think I am in another country?

Fraud systems compare the country of your address with your card, device and usual pattern, and a home routed eSIM makes you look like you are logging in from wherever it exits. Banks no longer take travel notices and will hold a high risk payment until you confirm it by text or app. A VPN address usually makes that scoring worse, not better.

Does routing through another country slow my internet?

It raises latency, not bandwidth. In the Airalo measurements routing type did not correlate with download speed, but home routing raised round trip times by about 621% on average. That is why video calls stutter while downloads look normal. Slow downloads have other causes, such as a daily cap or the visited network's policy.

How do I check where my eSIM traffic exits?

Wi-Fi off, eSIM set as the data line, then open the Cloudflare trace page and read the loc line, or ipinfo.io/json for the country and the owning network, or the client location on fast.com. Add dnscheck.tools for the DNS country and a ping to a nearby server for latency. Repeat after landing and after any top up, because exits change.

Is home routing a VPN or a security risk?

Neither. It is standard roaming architecture with no extra encryption and no choice of exit, and Holafly's own FAQ calls it industry practice. The USENIX researchers raise a jurisdiction point, that your traffic transits networks in a third country, which is worth knowing and not a reason to panic. A VPN is a separate tool with its own trade offs.

Sources

• Jang, Varvello, Lutu and Zaki, Unraveling the Airalo Ecosystem, arXiv, August 2024
• Motallebighomi and others, eSIMplicity or eSIMplification, USENIX Security 2025
• Ericsson Technology Review, roaming in the 5G system, read 14 September 2026
• IPinfo, mobile roaming and IP geolocation, read 14 September 2026
• Holafly FAQ on traffic routing, updated 12 November 2025
• Netflix help, Netflix says I am in another country, read 14 September 2026
• Google Workspace, Meet network requirements, read 14 September 2026
• Verizon Business, network latency statistics, August 2026