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Buy a data plan inside the Revolut app and the eSIM behind it comes from 1Global. That company has now agreed to pay a €10,500 fine to the Irish telecoms regulator, and to refund people who paid for a plan they could never switch on.
The case, reported by the Irish Independent, is mostly about things that went wrong before anyone had used a single megabyte. Customers never received their contract details in a form they could keep, including how the cooling-off period works and how to cancel. When the terms changed, 1Global pointed at a notice on its own website and considered that sufficient warning. Its complaints procedure did not meet the legal requirements. Buyers were not told what download speeds to expect. And travellers whose phone turned out to be carrier-locked were charged anyway for an eSIM they could not activate. Those are the people getting their money back.
"1Global has agreed to address the issues giving rise to the suspected regulatory breaches", ComReg said in its own statement, adding that it will keep watching how the company complies.
A fine that is not the point
A fine of €10,500 is not going to hurt anyone. What makes this case worth reading is that most of the failings on ComReg's list are common across the travel eSIM industry: contract terms you cannot keep, no clear word on what speeds to expect, changes announced on a website nobody reads.
The difference is that 1Global is a registered operator selling to consumers in Ireland, so a regulator could actually act. Most eSIM sellers are based outside Europe, or resell someone else's network under their own brand, and no regulator has a comparable hook on them.
The one item we would argue about
One point on the list is more interesting than the rest: the Revolut app kept working while your eSIM was active, even when the rest of the internet did not. European rules say a provider has to treat all internet traffic the same, and favouring your own partner's app is exactly what those rules were written to prevent.
We would push back on that one. Keeping a banking app reachable when your data has run out is not a streaming service jumping the queue. It is the thing you need most when you are stranded somewhere with an empty plan, and we think the rule misses its target here.
Our own experience
We have never run into any real trouble with Revolut's eSIM. We use it regularly on our own trips, mostly the free data that comes with some card tiers. It will not carry you through a holiday, but on a two-hour layover it is enough to pull up a boarding pass or tell someone you landed.
Less convenient was the routing. Our data often ran through servers in Hong Kong, which put some social networks out of reach.
Our one gripe is the price. Online the plans are advertised from €1.50, but once inside the Revolut app we have never managed to find that rate. What we found was always at least double.
