Travelling to the USA and Asia
 

hey guys, I'm travelling to the USA for 1 week and then will be in HK and Philipines for 3 weeks. I'd like to have my iphone for Text and Data so that I can stay connected with friends in those countries while I'm there. What do you guys do? I've heard about Roam Mobility, but wondering if i should just get a temporary prepaid phone or SIM in those countries

Can't help you with your asia trip. I use Roam Mobility and it's great. Check to see what your current plan's roaming package include. It would be less hassle if they're similar in price. Make sure your phone is unlocked for it to work and keep a copy of the phone settings you may have to change when you're in the States.

Rates: https://www.roammobility.com/plans
Settings: https://www.roammobility.com/support...artphones.html

Roam Mobility is your best bet for your week in the US. Just take note that it only gives you 400MB of data per day at 4G speeds before you get throttled to email/Whatsapp only speeds.

While you're in Asia, get a SIM card from there.

+1 in HK there is a mobile shop inside the airport you can sign up I think for a 1 week plane unlimited data for like $200 hk dollar.

in the US T-Mobile's Pay2Go option is really cheap if you have an unlocked phone...and often their sim card goes for 99 cents.

Yup. What everyone here says. US is cheap but roaming elsewhere is $$$. Get a new SIM for each country you're going to.

Make sure your iPhone is unlocked before you travel!

Use wifi

Depending on what hotel you stay at, they might provide you with a smart phone complimentary. The two hotels we stayed at in HK provided them.

T-Mo itself is no longer a great deal anymore unless you're on their grandfathered $3/day plans. Roam is easily the better bet (it's the same network), plus Roam allows you to tether and you only need to refill once a year vs every 90 days that you need to do with TMo.

+1

If you have a grandfathered $3/day plan, it's great, otherwise, it's not such a good deal anymore as costs will add up quickly.

I'm iffy on recommending Roam Mobility. Far too often, I get people telling me their service does not work when they reach their destination (i.e. Las Vegas, San Fran, Seattle etc.) because of a billing system error.

Reaching out to customer service on weekends can be a real pain as they contract their customer care centre to the Philippines so service can be shoddy. I guess the saying of "you get what you pay for" applies here, but your mileage may varry.

I've used Roam 3 times so far and it's been mostly pain free. The only trouble I've had thus far, is adding an additional day via SMS. It does take a little bit of time to get the service up and running again. But then again I have never done such a thing on any other provider, so perhaps the same thing happens with other companies.

Never had any issues with Roam billing myself either. Maybe I'm just lucky. On my last trip to Dallas, it took about 15 minutes for the service to kick in but other than that the only issue I've had is not taking into account time zone differences and it didn't kick in at the right time which was my fault.

Was able to call in and have them push back the activation time without too much difficulty. However, I can imagine there could be some difficulties with offshore call centres so I'm sure it's very much a YMMV when calling in.

Update: My brother is in Las Vegas. Despite topping up the account in Vancouver, it isn't active in the billing system. Took about 1 hour and multiple calls to their call centre to get this sorted out.

Again, this is more of a YMMV kind of thing, but something to be prepared for.