Cheap data connections for international flying

[Ultranomad]

The importance of a good Internet connection for GA pilots is obvious and has been discussed here a lot; furthermore, some of us, like yours truly, rely on quasi-permanent Internet connectivity to earn a living. At present, most cellular providers charge totally shameless rates for data roaming. On the other hand, home network data plans are fairly cheap but often dispensed in fairly large chunks (that is, if you visit a country for 1-2 days, you still have to buy a month's worth of Internet, which is fine for one time, but may rack up a pretty bill if you fly across 15 countries), and some of these SIM cards are data-only. One more important thing is the connection quality: many cellular networks have excellent data connection in densely populated areas, but getting through from an aerodrome is sometimes an exercise in futility. So, I am proposing a permanent thread to exchange information on good data plans for travelling pilots. Ideally, this should be either an affordable data roaming plan with a good international coverage (e.g. most of EU), or a local PAYG unlimited data connection available in small chunks of time, or a cheap pay-per-megabyte PAYG local data connection. Good coverage in less populated areas and a possibility to top-up via web or phone are important, too.

So, let me start:

Country: Czech Republic
Provider/plan: Vodafone Wild card (Divoká karta), 200 CZK (€8) in any supermarket for a card preloaded with 200 CZK.
Description: PAYG SIM card for both voice and data; several options can be set up: €1 for 24 hours / 25 MB FUP, €2 for 7 days / 60 MB FUP, €3 for 48 hours / 500 MB FUP, etc. (via web site or interactive voice menu in Czech or English). Cheap international voice roaming with the Passport option. Data roaming is expensive.
Top-up: the most convenient way is by credit card on the Vodafone web site (€8 minimum).
Coverage outside of populated areas: not perfect but usable - most aerodromes are close enough to cities.

[Genghis the Engineer]

I have a monthly contract with 3 (Hutchinson Telecom) in the UK.

I pay £25/month for more phone time than I can use, and unlimited data in the UK.

Abroad charges vary quite a lot. I think that the lowest is £1.28/Mb in Ireland (& £0.28/minute to phone home) , and the most I've paid yet was recently £6/Mb in Saudi Arabia (and £2/minute to phone home). Reliability and connectivity are very reliable most places.

For visitors to the UK, a 3 PAYG sim card for £15 will get you 300 minutes, 3,000 texts and unlimited data useage for a month. A £10 sim card gets you 100 minutes, 3,000 texts and 500Mb of data.

G

[david viewing]

Very interesting topic. I try to buy PAYG data SIMs when I travel and find this ranges from the trivially easy (vending machine in Heathrow baggage hall) to the stupifyingly difficult (USA and France).

Here's my current US solution:

1) Go to a local AT&T store and persuade them to issue you with a micro SIM for iPad, which has been free the last two times I've done this. Get the store to register the SIM at your US business address (they may volunteer to use their own store address instead). The rate for the SIM is $25 for 2GB to be used within 30 days.

2) Go to a supermarket and buy a pre-paid Visa gift card. Not a pre-paid credit card: these operate like a bank and require a valid address, zip code and and social security number. The gift card still requires registering to a US address, but in theory this can be a business address.

3) Go online and pay for the PAYG credit on the SIM using the Gift Card.

4) Except on this occasion, and the previous one, this doesn't work. The system somehow detects a problem with the 'address of convenience' and refuses to activate the SIM.

5) The Breakthrough: after literally hours on the phone to ever more helpful AT&T operators and supervisors (and these people really did try to help, even calling me back) a supervisor recalled hearing of this problem before and suggested checking the 'different billing address' box and entering a valid local address for delivery. That fixed it! Total time, including in store where the chap had to give up, about 4 Hrs.

6) The AT&T staff assured me that there is no US Govt conspiracy to prevent foreigners obtaining SIM cards. Most of the problems are that they have not woken up to PAYG and still carry out credit checks as if the person was obtaining a monthly plan.

7) However, there might still be a legislative hurdle in that all US cell phones are required to be registered for 911 service, which means having a valid address reported by the phone carrier during a 911 call. This may partly explain the carrier's reluctance to offer SIMs openly to foreigners.

I was lucky to choose a store right on the Canadian border where they were familiar with the issues, since Canadians don't have ZIP codes either.

9) The AT&T 3G service on the iPad is fairly slow, but did enable me to make very successful use of Foreflight throughout my trip. It's worth having for that alone. It also saved it's own cost by not having to buy outrageous hotel wifi packages.

10) The wonderful iPad is not quite so wonderful at this level and had to be reset several times after the 'No Service' message appeared permanently. Actually there was never 'No Service' although I never got to use it at the one place where I really wanted to use it, the Grand Canyon airport GCN. Fortunately the El Tovar lodge where I went for a $100 hamburger has excellent free wifi. Pity Jobs isn't around to kick the bottom of whichever software engineer thought that was acceptable.

Sorry to write so much, but hope that helps someone...

Oh, and while I'm here, has anyone got a solution for New Zealand?

[peterh337]

I am in Greece at the moment, on a 15 euro for 2GB for 10 days Cosmote "pay as you go karta" thingy.

I stick the SIM card into an E585 gprs/3g to wifi modem and then any device we have can use that. You can buy an E585 on Ebay, unlocked, for maybe 50 quid.

Without a doubt, locally purchased SIMs stuck into such a device are the best way to go.

The next best thing is much more pricey, per MB, and that is using UK network roaming data packs for the EU. For example Voda do £2/day for 25MB/day which is good value if the 25MB is enough per day.

Outside the EU, all the networks roam very expensively. There have been oddball SIM deals for that kind of travelling, which vary over the years. I have a "mobile data options" writeup on my website.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Living and working mostly in the UK I have used this company (http://www.0044.co.uk/) with good success to buy overseas sim cards before departure.

Prices are broadly the same as buying when I get there, so far.

G

[peterh337]

What I tend to find is that the locally bought SIMs need to be "activated" before they work. This can be trivial, or not... and with the EU data packs offered by most UK networks it's often not worth the bother. The networks try hard to differentiate payg from contract so usually there is a bit of a rigmarole to go through...

What can swing it (towards the local SIM) is if e.g. you want to drive using some kind of online mapping/ road nav tool (Google Maps e.g.) which tends to download about 1MB per few minutes. I have a Nokia 700 which has the huge benefit of Nokia Maps which work really well offline and are free.

[172driver]

I am one of these people who has a whole assortment of phones and SIM cards for various countries as I travel a lot (to put it mildly).

In the UK I am on 3 with unlimited data and more phone and SMS than I ever use, at 15 quid/month a pretty good deal (Genghis, why do you pay 25 ??).

Within Europe I usually just use what I call 'selective data roaming', meaning I use it as 'pull' as opposed to 'push'. This has so far proved more cost effective than buying local SIMs. I do have phones for a couple of regularly visited countries, though. Also have a US phone.

I find the data volume for METARs and TAFs to be so minimal that the cost becomes negligible. A great text-only app for that is AeroWeather (free, I think).

Maps. There is a very nifty iPhone app called MapsWithMe Pro (around 3 quid), that allows you to selectively download worldwide maps and then use only the built-in GPS of the iPhone - no roaming charges. While the open-source maps are not quite on a par with Google or ViaMichelin, they are pretty good and the accuracy is excellent. Just tried it last weekend in France and got an accuracy of a few meters! These are, of course road maps, not aviation.

In any case, WiFi (free or at little cost) is becoming pretty ubiquitous, even in Europe, so data roaming is decreasingly an issue.

[peterh337]

Nokia Maps are free for what appears to be the whole world. They are big e.g. 500MB for the UK, so one really has to download them onto a microSD card in the phone. I bet this has really undermined outfits like Tomtom charging £69 for "Europe" plus £60 for Greece :) :)

Serious anoraks can find special worldwide roaming deals which enable you to do everything without swapping SIM cards. I havent looked at these for ages but £0.50/MB was one such offer. This was PAYG - the gotcha was whether it could be topped off using a website (obviously).

I find the wifi situation depressing. Here in Greece, last September, we did not find a single free wifi network. Now, likewise. Not even one. And the "free" hotel ones where the hotel gives you the login tend to be problematic, with a lousy signal in the room. That's why I go for the local SIM stuck in the E585 - 2GB takes care of everything and it works practically everywhere. The Cosmote SIM is good for 1 year; we tend to do Greece slightly more often than that so we just top it off instead of spending 10 euros buying a new one each time.

The networks could make it so much easier but they clearly don't want to.

[Genghis the Engineer]

In the UK I am on 3 with unlimited data and more phone and SMS than I ever use, at 15 quid/month a pretty good deal (Genghis, why do you pay 25 ??).

Because most months I genuinely do manage to pass 1000 minutes of use, and I really like my HTC phone.

G

[Stephen Furner]

Public wi-fi is a major growth area for mobile communications. Commercial providers have interworking arrangements that mean if you have a UK contract you can use participating networks when abroad. “ Laptops now represent less than half (48%) of the connections to hotspots, with smartphones now encompassing 36% and tablets already on 10%” Global Developments in Public Wi-Fi WBA Industry Report, 2011 | Wireless Broadband Alliance (http://www.wballiance.com/resource-centre/global-developments-wifi-report.html)

[Ultranomad]

I found an (almost universal) answer to my own question. A friend pointed me to prepaidwithdata.wikia.com (http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com), which has an overview of PAYG data plans for different countries. A good resource.