Getting T-mobile international data to work in Hong Kong (and maybe China/Japan)

The T-mobile ONE plan gives you unlimited data while roaming in 140+ countries — for about $70 / month. It’s maybe more expensive than buying SIM cards in each individual country, but by reducing the amount of SIM card buying and swapping, it’s a pretty good value.

That’s pretty sweet, except… when we had a layover in Tokyo’s Narita airport, my international SMS and Voice worked, but not my Data.

The same thing happened in Hong Kong — SMS and Voice worked, but not Data.

I need Data!!!!

I called T-mobile support, and the agent walked me through everything, confirming my APN settings, and then we tried connecting manually to each of the specific mobile network operators in Hong Kong.

Nothing worked.

China Mobile SIM card

I thought maybe something was wrong with my phone. So to really debug it, I bought a China Mobile sim-card (1.5GB for 5 days) for about HK$68 (about $8.72 USD) from a local China Mobile outlet.

This also didn’t work. Fuck, so maybe it was my phone, right? We went back to the store, and the China Mobile rep fiddled with my APN settings, and magically, it worked.

The key change she made was:

• Bearer was changed to “LTE”, not “unspecified”

Trying it out on T-mobile

I tried this out on T-mobile, and voila, it worked!

So take the APN settings you get from T-mobile, then change Bearer from “unspecified” to “LTE”.

Then restart your phone. I’ve found that restarting the phone is often helpful, whenever I lose connectivity to mobile data.

Still stuck?

The following may or may not help.

In Hong Kong, it seemed to help to:

1. Change network mode from “Global” to “LTE / GSM / UMTS”
2. Set to manually specify the network operator, instead of automatically.

For example, I see amongst my list of possible network operators:

• 3
• 3 (2G)
• PCCW-HKT
• CSL
• China Mobile HK
• SmarTone HK
• CHMK

For me, choosing the “3 (2G)” network worked, but leaving things on automatic, where my phone tries to connect to the regular “3” network failed.

You might want to also try re-booting your phone after each setting change.

Also make sure you test in an area where there’s definitely mobile Data coverage. Otherwise, you run the risk of nothing working — when you actually had the right configuration. (I was frustrated because nothing was working when I was fiddling with settings in my hotel room. It turns out my hotel room had very poor mobile data coverage.)

Fiddling with these settings got things working in Hong Kong, but when we went to Macau, I had to change my network operator to “3 (Macau)”. But I suspect I could’ve gotten re-connected by simply restarting my phone instead of manually setting mobile network operators.