As we continue to move between countries, we gain more insights how to use smartphones more efficiently using the local SIM card. Wikia has a section for prepaid SIM cards helps tremendously by giving the initial overview, but as providers, plans and prices constantly change, it is not always accurate.
Few things we picked up so far:
1. Buying the SIM card
- Ensure the provider registers the account properly so they won’t cut the account off all of a sudden (like what happened to us in China).
- Validate the expiry of the SIM card and the plan you purchase, in some countries it is stated nicely (like Korea, Japan and Thailand) but in some countries it is very obscured (like Cambodia) or not very flexible (like China where many plans start and end at each calendar month while some allow carry over to the next month).
2. Using the phone
- In some countries (like Japan), it is not simple to get a voice plan, but in most usually when you buy the SIM card it comes with some credit which allows you to dial and send text messages. In many countries there are still cross network charges, so pay attention to the area code when dialing as it can be very expensive. In Cambodia, for example, many businesses (and even people) have multiple numbers so they can call and receive calls in multiple networks.
- Depends on the provider and country, I didn’t encounter significant coverage issues as long as we stayed near urban areas. In most places we had either Edge or HPSA data connections, while in rural areas or between cities it was mostly still 3G.
- The data plans usually are generous and not expensive (unlike North America), depends on the usage, I usually get the cheapest package (0.5–1GB these days). We use the phone’s data mainly for few things: emails, travel apps (like Agoda and Trip Advisor) and fast location fixes as our low end Android phones are notoriously slow getting GPS based fixes
- Almost everywhere we stayed at we had free wifi so once there, there is no need for cellular data. That way, the data plan consumption is not extreme, and we usually get away with about 1GB per month.
- In some countries, the providers have a wifi coverage for their customers, I try to get a plan which includes this feature, then it can reduce the data consumption significantly. South Korea is a good example, where after 3 weeks, we consumed about 200MB of data, the rest was wifi usage which the provider had everywhere.
- Sometimes it is worth having a phone which supports PC tethering or act as a wifi hot spot. In Japan we stayed in a place with no wifi (even though the AirBNB ad was claiming there was), so we had to hotspot for almost a week every night when we were at home
3. Security
- I don’t consider wifi connections to be secured, though in Cambodia and Thailand most guesthouses’ wifi were secured with a password and not open. My assumption is that my passwords will leak eventually, so I try to use a secured factor authentication. This, however, makes me dependent on my phone to be able to log in to the most important accounts, so I also need to protect it as well as losing it is a huge problem — no codes to enter as well as app specific keys stored on it.
- In China, due to the Great Firewall, we used VPN almost exclusively, both over wifi and cellular, but this wasn’t a smooth experience, mostly through wifi. Most of the issues were related to DNS resolving, or just connection to the access points which sometimes just refuse to allow a device to connect.
Overall, we find the smartphone with data enabled a nice luxury, we can get away without it (as we’ve shown to ourselves towards our trip’s end in China) but it is makes traveling easier for sure.
