First off, I just want to say, the "free tier" of international data is extremely appreciated for two important reasons:
- Overage is literally impossible (i.e. no "bill shock").
- If you don't wish to pay, you get "something" for nothing.
So, now, the "bad." The reality is that T-Mobile's free tier is incredibly slow like "my 56K modem was faster than this" slow. A single modern web-site can literally take so long to load that my phone would fall asleep and then cut off the connection (meaning I'd have to start all over).
It is really only useful for push notifications and to check your email if you're really patient. Even for reading sites like Reddit, it would drive you up the wall. Looking at images (e.g. imgur) is a no-go and YouTube is definitely not even plausible.
Now, if you pay, you get more data per dollar than you do on most other big US networks and you legitimately get 4G speeds in many places (at least I certainly did). So if you pay you wouldn't even know you were abroad. And when you run out of paid data, you drop down to the slow speed again rather than being cut off (which is nice, so you feel safe to use 100% of your paid data with no risk).
So, to me, T-Mobile's free tier doesn't really change the formula for international travel. It just solves overage/bill shock and gives you some basic notifications and maybe email. Those aren't things to be sniffed at, they're legitimately nice, but people should manage their expectations.
PS - Protip: Restart your phone every single time you change countries. My phone got "confused" and would refuse to connect until I restarted. We did a cruise so a new country was daily, and I missed a day of data because I thought that country simply wasn't supported (rather than it being a phone problem).
In the end, we paid $40 (all for calls @ $0.20/min) for 3 weeks of near-normal usage with 2 iPhones.
To me that's very much a game changer - previously I paid double that same amount as an accidentally access charge (forgot to turn off roaming on my AT&T phone). Not to mention I had to spend 30m with the AT&T rep to configure our accounts so we wouldn't get charged $2/min prior to our trip.
It was this cruise but in reverse (Aruba last, cayman first):
Ports: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida | Aruba | Cartagena, Colombia | Panama Canal, Panama (Gatun Lake) | Colon, Panama | Limon, Costa Rica | Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands | Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
When I paid for data I got good 3G or 4G speeds. With free data it was incredibly slow, like sub-56K modem slow, even at the same ports as the 4G speeds with paid.
Here's a YouTube video someone else took which accurately represents my experience:
https://youtu.be/PISKCPFu3iU?t=26s
It takes a minute to load Gizmoto's homepage.
What's your experience with Google Maps at the free 2G speeds? That would be my first question when it comes to travel.
"Unpleasant." What I'd strongly recommend is to download the map using offline maps before you leave. If you wait for Google Maps to download the data over the 2G/free tier you'll be in for a very long (10+ minute) wait.
I did not do offline maps before I left, but mostly we were on tours so we didn't really need them. But if I was e.g. exploring a city or doing something on my own, you'd definitely want to do offline maps if you wanted to use Google Maps on their free tier.
It's a long list, but there's some notable / surprising absences (e.g. Brazil, Spain).
I was very satisfied and would gladly use them again. Having transit directions made spontaneous travel much easier.
Anyway, I'll be damn glad if an alternative appears as it'll give me an additional chance to qualify.
It seems like UK carriers are lagging behind rather badly in this regard.
http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home
It's not as many countries, but with 3 you can get unlimited data at a fraction of the cost (I currently pay £15/month with 3 for unlimited data, 5000 3 to 3 minutes, 5000 texts and 2000 minutes to other networks).
nevertheless, they also have an option to upgrade to 3G data for a fee ($10 or so).
For comparison:
In Germany I have an LTE data plan for my tablet where I pay €24.99 for 7.5GB (~$3.57/GB), the lowest plan being €6.99 for 1GB (~$7.50/GB). Unlimited calls in Germany including 1GB data would cost me €19.99/month (~$21.48) at the same provider and unlimited text in Germany would be an additional €4.99/month (~$5.36), otherwise texts are €0.09 each (~$0.10). Many German providers offer pre-paid (or post-paid) plans with €0.09/minute and €0.09/text.
My current plans work out as follows:
Tablet with 7.5GB LTE data plan: €24.99 / ~$26.83 (~$3.57/GB)
Smartphone with 1GB LTE data, 200 minutes and 200 texts: €11.90 / ~$12.87
Overages per minute: €0.09 / ~$0.10
Overages per text: €0.09 / ~$0.10
Overages for data: free (at significantly reduced speed; "high-speed" extra data can be added for €3-9/GB depending on the plan and provider)
The next closest plan for my smartphone would be 1GB LTE data, 400 minutes and 400 texts at €15.90 / ~$17.07, the difference works out to €0.01 (~$0.01) per minute or text.
I'm using my own devices, so the plans don't include the cost of the devices themselves.
My mobile phone bill over the past months mostly ranged from €14-20 and my tablet bill was mostly fixed at €24.99 (turns out 7.5GB is generally sufficient unless I use Netflix outside WiFi a lot).
Also, tethering isn't a problem either, but obviously roaming is excessively expensive even in the EU.
That same carrier (called "Free mobile") offers a €2.00/mo plan for 2h talk, unlimited SMS/MMS and 50Mo data, which is €0/mo (free) if you're subscribed to their broadband.
EDIT: typo
I pay about $65 / month with AT&T, for unlimited talk & text, and 5gb of LTE data (10gb shared on a two person family plan). That includes the cost of the device.
I always hear Americans say they have unlimited talk and text. Is this really the most popular option or do most plans just include it by default? Might explain why American mobile plans always sound so incredibly expensive to me (i.e. "pay for what you use" a la Ting is actually a disruptive idea in that market because everybody overpays by default).
I would think the increased expenditure of 26 times more towers would increase the cost of plans.
Europe also never had the culture of carrier subsidized phones, and so were never accustomed to paying more in monthly fees in exchange for low to no cost upgrades of hardware.
Tethering varies by carrier in the US - Verizon is legally obligated to allow tethering due to the result of a lawsuit, so they do not charge any extra for this, i believe t-mobile also does not charge for tethering, but it is not related to a lawsuit AFAIK
A final point is that pricing for data is fundamentally different in europe as i understand it. Most plans i am familiar with in europe tier data prices by speed - in the US almost all plans get the fastest speeds available, but it is tiered but amount of data used. You cannot pay for faster speeds on a typical US plan, only for greater amounts of data. The european side of that may have changed, as its been a year or so since i was last in europe looking into this
That's an interesting attempt to justify the price, but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live. Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations, while the UK has 23,000. (Despite the fact that the UK is ~30 time smaller than the US). So your argument does not hold.
On another note, I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware. You don't. You're literally paying _more_ to upgrade your phone/get a new phone in the long run, than just buying one outright. The reason you can buy an iPhone for 99 USD is because you'll be paying ~27 USD "extra" for the next 2 years, which is exactly the same as if you had just spent 600 outright and saved that amount (or even more, 99% of the time) over the next 2 years. There's no "subsidization" going on, if anything, you're subsidizing the company.
[1] http://www.statisticbrain.com/cell-phone-tower-statistics/
https://www.dna.fi/liittymat https://kauppa.saunalahti.fi/#!/matkapuhelinliittymat
I understand that theres a lot of variety in Europe, but to say that tiers by speed doesn't happen is factually incorrect.
>There's no tradeoff
I never said there was, I am simply pointing out differences in how the markets are set up and function in these vastly different continents
>there's not the same quadrupoly that exists in the US
This is true, this is the biggest problem with the US cellular market today
>That's an interesting attempt to justify the price
I'm not trying to justify anything, just explain some of the differences.
>but it completely fails to take into account that simply calculating area is nowhere near accurate for the number of towers - it depends on where people live
It depends on hundreds of factors - population density, building density, building materials, types of cellular radios used (CDMA vs GSM have different ranges), terrain, interference, number of carriers, etc
The difference in land area is definitely a factor - i never said it was the only one. My mistake was obviously saying '26 times more towers', which i admit was a careless thing to say, but i think it still made my point. The US has significantly more infrastructure than any single european country, in part due to its much larger coverage area.
>Fortunately people live close together, so towers don't need to cover every square inch of the country.
Much truer in Europe than in the US - US: 32.65/sq km UK: 262/sq km [1]
>If you look up the number of towers, you'll find that the US has roughly 120,000 mobile base stations
I see 205,000[2] - which puts the US at ~10 times the towers of the UK
>So your argument does not hold. do you think that the cost of ~10 times more infrastructure is not part of the higher prices in the US compared to the UK? My argument was that having to spend much greater amounts on infrastructure is one of the reasons for a price difference, i didn't say it was the only reason or explanation just that it's worth noting.
>I'll never understand how people think that you get "low to no cost upgrades" of hardware.
This is just the psychology of purchasing. People don't like spending a lot of money at once and would prefer to spread costs out over time - I completely agree that the 'subsidized' model is garbage, but i haven't been able to convince a single family member to switch to buying phones outright no matter how many times i show them the lower cost after the full two years. Of course by low to no cost i meant when you walk into the provider's location after two years, you walk out with a new phone that you paid very little for during that transaction. It doesn't seem to matter to most people that they end up paying more than the phones full retail cost over the course of two years.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_de... [2]http://www.statisticbrain.com/cell-phone-tower-statistics/
I live in the Netherlands and subsidized phones are the norm here, don't think other countries are that different.
What you say about subsidized phones is patently false. I don't recall unsubsidized phones being a thing at all in Germany when mobile phones first became popular. Even today many if not most Germans seem to prefer subsidized phones -- in my experience buying your phone separately is only common in the more tech savvy or higher end markets, although the growing popularity of discounted month-to-month mobile plans may be changing that.
AFAIK tethering and jailbreaking/rooting is, generally speaking, always legal in Germany. For subsidized phones things can be different if you're not actually purchasing the phone but only leasing it (because it isn't your property and therefore you're not allowed to modify it), but I think these days most contracts have you actually purchase the phone. Not sure whether this is due to market demand, but I think there's also a decline in carrier branded phones, so it might simply be that.
Except for pre-paid/post-paid (i.e. no fixed plan, pay-as-you-go) contracts, I think all German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data. As far as I can tell, most if not all providers these days offer their fastest speeds as "high-speed" on all contracts with only the amount of data being the difference, not tiered speed caps (this definitely used to be different).
So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date. At least with regard to Germany -- I don't know enough about other EU countries to say anything about them.
In fact, E-Plus itself seems to own multiple brands: BASE, Blau, ALDI Talk, Simyo, VIVA, JambaSIM and AY YILDIZ. So they're effectively just discount brands with different target audiences (e.g. AY YILDIZ offers discounted calls to Turkey and is marketed at the large Turkish-speaking minority).
I don't think E-Plus offers any mobile plans under its own brand at all, actually. Their own website links to BASE, which is their "regular" (non-discount) brand. They used to offer plans themselves in the past, though.
Confusingly there's also mobilcom-debitel (again owning several brands) which doesn't seem to be affiliated with any network operator and offers separate plans for the different networks. I think they did own some frequencies at some point and eventually sold them off, so that might at least explain why they exist at all (although I'm not sure how they can compete with the actual operators' own brands).
There are only four actual network operators in Germany: Telekom Deutschland (D1), Vodafone (D2), E-Plus (E1) and Telefónica Germany / O2 (E2). The frequencies for GSM, UMTS and LTE were auctioned off (D1/D2/E1/E2 referring to the original GSM frequencies of the D (GSM-900) and E (DCS-1800) networks).
There's actually a fifth operator on GSM: Deutsche Bahn (German railway). But they're obviously not in the phone business.
The same is true in the US, they are called MVNO's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_mobile_vi...
>What you say about subsidized phones is patently false
You are most likely talking about carriers allowing people to finance their phones in europe. Where you can pay an additional 20 euros a month to get the new iphone or whatever.
This is not at all what i'm talking about.
In the US, when you open a cell phone contract, you get a new phone at a discounted price. You sign a contract and you get to choose from the carriers selection of phones, older phones being completely free, newest phones costing 200 dollars. The rest of the cost of the phone is hidden inside of the cost of the plan itself. There is no line item for how much you are paying for the phone each month, it is simply part of the pricing of the service itself. When your phone has been completely paid off, you will never know because your plans price will not change.
In europe, you finance phones, when they are paid off you stop paying for the phone and you then own the phone. your bill goes down. This is not at all the same behavior as the subsidized phone system in the US.
>German providers offer unlimited low-speed data with a varying amount of high-speed data
This is what im talking about, this does not exist in the US. There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
There is some subversion by carriers using 'throttling' where they slow certain lines down to a crawl when the carrier decides they've used too much data for the month, but that is by no means a part of how plans are priced.
>So, yeah, your information seems to be a bit out of date
admittedly so, i haven't been in europe for more than a week since 2013 - and have never spent much time in germany
Now many providers have dropped the "unlimited 2G" data claim and just stating the rate limit after you use your high-speed bucket.
https://kauppa.saunalahti.fi/#!/matkapuhelinliittymat https://www.dna.fi/liittymat
This has definitely been a thing in Germany in the past. In fact, I don't think I've seen ever the "pay $(x+y)/month for 24 months for the plan and phone, then pay only $x/month" model. Usually after 24 months you'd be offered a new phone (again for "free" or a radically "discounted" price). This may have changed since I stopped paying attention to long-term plans but you're wrong in thinking we never had what you have in the US.
> There is no variation of speeds, you either have data or you dont.
We also had hard data caps very early on. We just replaced that with "unlimited" plans with a cap on "high-speed" data at some point.
That said, the low-speed data might as well not be available at all -- most people I know buy extra if they hit their high-speed cap. It's barely sufficient for checking your e-mail.
When it comes to carrier subsidizing, we actually have both non-subsidized and subsidized, as well as "semi-subsidized" (e.g. pay half price of the phone, but you can't change operator for 2 years).
The downside IMO with mobile in Europe is that we have so many small countries, so occasionally you have to leave your country (=roaming fees) for some reason.
In Latvia we have unlimited calls and messages for 9.95€. Add unlimited 2G/3G/4G data for 9.99€. That's roughly 20€ for unlimited everything. Tethering is not disabled, however, you could get downgraded to slower speeds for abuse (torrents & alike; never heard of this being enforced).
Roaming charges in while in EU are regulated at 0.19€ per minute, messages for 0.09€ per minute. Data is still expensive, though - 0,20€ per MB. Mobile operators provide roaming data packages, which might lower your data bill to 0.14€ per MB.
There is a upcoming EU roam-like-home regulation, which would mean that you never pay more than at home for anything - including data.