My experience with Silent.link (and some questions)

ThinkingPaint

Hello all, I'm a GrapheneOS user with a Pixel 7 in the US and I recently switched to from Verizon to silent.link and I'd like to share my experience and ask some questions.

Pros of silent.link:

Very easy setup
Data is comparatively very cheap (AT&T is $1.60/GB)
No hotspot/tethering restrictions
Ability to switch to any network if the cheapest one has poor coverage.

Cons:

To be honest it's pretty hard to trust silent.link given how little info there is about them and most of their website is just marketing with no technical descriptions.
Data is very slow (3-10 mbps) even when I use the same Verizon network I've been using and in the same locations where I used to get 50-100 mbps so I know it's not because of the network itself. I don't know if the cell companies throttle users that are not their own customers or of something else is going on. The status bar often says 5G but the Network Survey app says that I am still connected to LTE cell sites and 5G NR NSA is only the overlay network, but this is the same behavior that I saw with Verizon as one of their customers. I have never connected to a mmWave cell site so I don't know if that's included but that's more likely due to the area that I live.
This is just personal thoughts, but I feel like a user who appears to be roaming from Poland (especially when services like silent.link are known to exist) would actually raise suspicion of you to authorities and therefore wipe away any privacy that you would hope to get from such a service because it would not be very difficult for the network provider or authorities to figure out who an IMSI/IMEI belongs to based on the location history even when I use airplane mode at home.

Looking in the APN settings, it appears they're using Plus.pl (Polish telecom company) and my IP address without a VPN is located in Warsaw. The only official info I could find is from an Opt Out podcast episode with the founder of silent.link and he comes across like he is just reading from a script. He explains that he doesn't reveal a lot of info about how it works or what company they work with to protect users from attacks, which is plausible I guess but it doesn't really make sense given that the name of the company is all over the ESIM and APN settings page.

thmf

ThinkingPaint Cons:

To be honest it's pretty hard to trust silent.link given how little info there is about them and most of their website is just marketing with no technical descriptions.

I'm not sure how this is different from any other mobile service provider. Am I missing something?

ThinkingPaint 3. This is just personal thoughts, but I feel like a user who appears to be roaming from Poland (especially when services like silent.link are known to exist) would actually raise suspicion of you to authorities and therefore wipe away any privacy that you would hope to get from such a service because it would not be very difficult for the network provider or authorities to figure out who an IMSI/IMEI belongs to based on the location history even when I use airplane mode at home.

You absolutely shouldn't expect any privacy from any mobile network. Your location is known at all times when your phone modem is on and it's by design. You even don't need to have a sim card for that to be true. To expect privacy (from mobile network only), you can enable airplane mode and then turn on WiFi + VPN with no sim card in the phone. This is the only way.

Silent.link is good because it can give you a data only plan, which in turn enables you to use e2ee products for communication, be always on VPN (+ GrapheneOS anti leaks protection), and the like. It's a good foundation if you need to be online/reachable, but it comes with a privacy tradeoff just like any other mobile service provider out there, just because it uses mobile networks. It's not silent.link that's bad, it's the mobile networks design from decades ago.

Edit:
More details here.