International Travel, Advice?

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rive22

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What's the best route to go? AT&T, T-mobile? Something else? Or buy in country sim cards for local carriers? I'd like to preferably use a US number. Will be traveling many European Countries for an extended time.

Thoughts?
 
If you're gone that long, just make sure your phone is unlocked and get a local sim.

I think t-mobile does offer free texting and (slow) data in some countries, calling is 20 cents a minute. Depends on your usage then.
 
The T-Mobile stuff listed above is probably your best bet. Free sms and 2g or 3g data with all the newer post paid plans. Use a T-Mobile Android with Wi-Fi calling and you can also set to never use cell towers (sms and data are not effected by this) and place free WiFi calls back home as well.
 
TMo and Sprint have very good free roaming agreements. It only covers data and text. Data typically will be slow, 2G slow, but there are some cases where I gotten 4G/LTE. Sometimes the data is enough to download maps, but when it can't... dammit, I'm totally lost!

This is why I want a dual-sim phone. I can still get and answer my texts from America. But I will still need to let the people there locally to reach me when data isn't enough to support iMessage, Hangouts, FB Message, WhatsApp, Line, or Skype. And this is the biggest problem.
 
Good tips guys. I didn't even know dual sim card phones were a thing, haven't been paying much attention lately. That is the perfect idea and a slam dunk, very awesome :D
 
Certainly if you're going to Europe this summer, your problem is basically solved with TMo.
 
silent-circuit said:
Set up a forward to a google voice number and wherever you have data you can get unlimited calling free, pretty much.
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I don't think that's how Google Voice/Hangout numbers work. Google Voice numbers works as call forwarding. You can straight up do voice chat through Hangout with other people with Hangout. In order for your Google Voice to be setup as VoIP, you'll need third party apps, if they still work. (Last I checked, only certain hardware like Obihai and GVJack for MagicJack still works. I don't believe any iOS or Android apps work.) Correct me if I'm wrong.

P.S. Google Voice through Google Talk on the browser works as VoIP.
 
It used to. Maybe they fucked with it, don't know, but a couple years ago people were all forwarding their cells to their google voice numbers and effectively using data and no voice minutes.
 
Now they need to make a dual sim phone with 3rd slot for memory card. I'm not sure I want to trade 256GB for a 2nd SIM, may have to go single SIM. Things are moving in the right direction though, I'm sure it's just a matter of time. :)
 
Project Fi is the best of TMO and Sprint combined. But his monthly bill seems a bit high not knowing how many international voice minutes he used.

Last year. I went to Taiwan for a month and got myself a local sim from the biggest carrier and a plan for $30 that includes 10000 minutes and 20 GB of data (some 2x data promo I think), which would only expire after a year; gave card to my friend after so he could use the 13GB I didn't use. I used my hotel's address to register. This is cheaper than his $61 a month for 3 months for however much minutes + data he did use. I don't know what the fees in France, England, or Italy are.
 
This is a little bit of thread necro but I travel overseas for work a lot -- mostly to Ireland, England, Germany, and Japan. I am a T-Mo customer and the free international roaming described above works PERFECTLY. I just got back from two weeks in Japan. When I got back I had a grand total of $0.60USD in international charges from when I had to call a USA landline for ~5 minutes.
 
svet-am said:
This is a little bit of thread necro but I travel overseas for work a lot -- mostly to Ireland, England, Germany, and Japan. I am a T-Mo customer and the free international roaming described above works PERFECTLY. I just got back from two weeks in Japan. When I got back I had a grand total of $0.60USD in international charges from when I had to call a USA landline for ~5 minutes.
Click to expand...
This doesn't seem too bad considering the roaming charges I guess!
 
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