Yeah, this is all true in my experience. We buy devices with the appropriate Quectel modem for the region, stick a SIM card in from a provider who has relations

Yeah, this is all true in my experience. We buy devices with the appropriate Quectel modem for the region, stick a SIM card in from a provider who has relationships with operators worldwide, then ship it to site. Once it gets given some power the device will connect to whatever mobile network has best signal and call home - we don't actually do a lot of international deployments but even within the country it's hugely useful to have SIMs that will happily roam between all the major operators.