Staying online while traveling abroad is becoming increasingly useful. Looking up directions, the best nearby restaurants, backing up your photos or just messaging friends and familiy, are all habits that have become part of everyday life. And if you’re anything like me, you seem to always forget to download offline maps and other useful resources prior to traveling. Good wifi spots can be hard to find, and the internet on those is usually very slow. Further more, international roaming (using your SIM card from home abroad) has proven to still be very expensive, especially for data.
The solution to this problem is to simply purchase a local prepaid SIM card. Now, some people might say that takes a lot of hassle and leg work, but it’s actually very simple. The reason is that there is a wiki desgined entirely for this purpose, which is both accurate and updated. It lists various network carriers in most countries, prices for the different data packages and where to purchase them. It is something that I always take advantage of when traveling abroad. Especially outside the European Union, where my roaming fees are 10 USD+ per megabyte.
Here you see some examples of the data plans I purchased on my last trips:
- Tanzania: 6 GB (7 days) = 4 USD
- Panama: 1.5 GB (15 days) = 10 USD
- Vietnam: 3 GB (30 days) = 8 USD
All of these were 3G / 4G / LTE with good internet speed. Further, the money I saved from just looking up directions and avoiding taxi drivers from overcharging me, far exceeds the costs associated with purchasing a local SIM-card.
The wiki designed for this purpose is called Prepaid Data SIM Card Wiki and can be accessed on the following link:
http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Prepaid_SIM_with_data
