I live in the US and have rental/vacation property in BCS Mexico. I have my RFC and wanted to open a Mexican bank account, but I had to have a Mexican phone number. I didn’t want two phones. What a hassle. Then I discovered the iPhone with the esim which is a virtual sim - I can have more than one phone number on the same phone! I changed my carrier to T-Mobile in the US because my cell carrier at the time did not support esim. T-Mobile sent me a physical sim, once I installed that and got it working, I called T-Mobile support to transfer the number to the esim. I removed the physical sim, and. viola! It was still working. When I arrived in Mexico, I purchased a physical pay-as-you go sim from a local Telcel phone store for something like $10 US which gave me 30 days and 5GB of data. Put it in and it worked immediately and I had two phone numbers on my phone.
Switched my data and phone service to the Mexican phone number in the settings and went to Banorte (Mexican) bank and got my account and they loaded their mobile app on my phone. Love the Banorte app. The Telcel app is also loaded on my phone. I setup a recurrent payment every month to automatically pay another $10 for the next 30 days. It is essentially the same as having a permanent Mexican phone number (post-paid), without the hassle.
I can choose either location to handle data and phone separately in settings, but I can also choose which phone I want to use when I make a phone call or send a text. I can completely turn off one phone line or the other. I can choose which apps use which data carrier. You see all those options once you have the second line.
BE CAREFUL - as some phone have esim, but not a physical sim port. It can be difficult to get esim support in a foreign country. I know it is in Mexico. MAKE SURE YOU GET A PHONE WITH ESIM AND PHYSICAL SIM PORT.
esim for Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212780
esim for Android:
https://www.virginplus.ca/en/support/esim-dual-sim-android.html?province=ON&geoResult=failed
