I took my wife for a romantic trip to Paris at the beginning of last year to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary and as we walked the streets of the City of Love, my wife would look for quaint cafes to eat at and interesting shopping locations to visit. Unbeknownst to my wife, I made my decision on which locations looked good based on one item only. The locations with a Wi-Fi symbol at the front of them looked surprisingly more attractive to me!
I am sure that after Dr Martin Cooper made that famous first handheld mobile phone call on 3 April 1973, the next question he was asked was whether the phone would work overseas. With 9.2 million Australians leaving our shores last year for a short trip and with 1.4 active mobile services per person in Australia, how to best travel overseas with our technology is a question that is asked by tens of thousands every day.
There are two broad areas to consider – voice and data. The solutions for both can be vastly different and with my limited space available, this will only touch on the myriad of possible solutions.
Firstly, consider voice.
There are three main questions you need to ask before you set out on your journey. How many; how long and where to? How many calls do you think you will receive and make while you travel and do you need people to be able to contact you on your normal number? How long will you be overseas for? Where are you going to and, in particular, are you visiting a number of different countries in your travels or staying largely in one country? There are ancillary questions associated with these. For example, if you want to make phone calls will those phone calls be back to Australia or will they be calls within the country that you are visiting? Is it acceptable to give people a different number to contact you on for your time overseas? Are the countries you are visiting ones that have roaming agreements with your local carrier?
New Zealand; the UK and the USA are the top three destinations visited by Australians so I will use the US as an example. If I was going for a short trip to the US that also might include some time in Fiji as a stopover on the way there and a couple of days in New Zealand on the way home, my decision would be to use my normal phone with my normal number and use international roaming. People can call me on my normal mobile number and they will only pay the normal cost of a mobile call. I will pay around $1 to $3 per minute (country and carrier dependent) to make and receive calls but I would limit my calls in length and frequency. I would only have to ensure I had international roaming activated on my account so the convenience and comfort of knowing it would all just work would be worth the additional call costs that I would see on my next bill. I could receive text messages for free but pay around 75c to send them. If I wanted to talk and text more, Australian carriers typically offer a pre-purchased overseas pass. Again this is designed for short term stays but for $5 to $15 per day, I could have unlimited calls and texts on that trip and still use my same number. With some slight variations, this general advice typically applies to Pre-Paid services as well.
If I was going to stay in one location for a longer period of time, I would use a separate SIM card. My mobile would need to be unlocked from any specific carrier for this to work and I would not receive calls on my normal number. I could setup my Memo or Messagebank service to tell people my international number while I travelled – and then I would know if they really wanted to speak with me!
The advantage of a separate SIM (either setup before you travel or purchased overseas) is the price. An overseas SIM would see phone call prices reduced to around 25c to $1 per minute to call back to Australia or to call within the country you are visiting. You can also buy local Pre-Paid SIM cards which will work well if the majority of your calls are within your country of destination.
You can see how confusing it is with so many variables – and we haven’t even started on data yet.
The short answer to the question of using data while roaming is NO! The long answer is NOOOOOOO! With rates in the vicinity of $3,000 per GB (compared to $10 per GB while in Australia) you can see how quickly a bill could escalate. You could pre-purchase overseas data packs that might reduce the effective price to $40 per GB but you still have significant limits on the amount of data available. Again you could use a local SIM in your phone with a focus on data or there are clever concepts whereby you can place a sticker over your SIM that allows your SIM to roam for voice but then have unlimited data for travelling in the vicinity of $8 per day. Then of course you can use a separate mobile hotspot with a local SIM card or, as I did in Paris, rely on Wi-Fi hotspots which then also bring into the calculation using VoIP for your voice services to reduce your calls to miniscule levels.
The one point I hope you take from this is that travelling overseas with your mobile is complicated and you need to review your own specific circumstances to come up with the best individual plan. It was also suggested to me that you could consider just leaving your phone at home and enjoy a break… Now I am dreaming!
Mathew Dickerson