Traveling abroad

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My wife and I recently spent a couple of weeks touring Ireland.  Its an amazingly beautiful  country with rich culture, friendly people, fun music and pub life and lots to do!  I highly recommend a visit.  I thought I was pretty prepared from a technology perspective, but I learned a whole lot about it on that trip.  I’d like to share it with you.

Before you leave

This is important.  Contact your cellular provider about options for when you travel abroad.  I find it easiest to do this on the carrier’s website, but you can call them if you wish.

You need to find out about your options for cellular data and voice plans when you are out of the country.  At the time I was with AT&T (I have since switched to Verizon).  They had two plans (3 if you count the dummy plan):

  1. For about $60/month per phone you can have a small amount of data and voice minutes while traveling abroad.  Of course, you have to initiate this for each phone line before you leave.

  2. For $10/day (24-hour period) you can access your data and voice plan at home.  You have to enable this on your account on each phone line before you leave the country.

  3. The dummy plan.  Just leave the country with no preparation and start using your phone as you wish when you get there.  If you like surprises and really high cellular bills (many hundreds of dollars) when you get home go for this option.

We went with option #2 above.  I activated this option on both of our phones and my wife’s cellular iPad.  The way it works is to simply turn the device’s airplane mode OFF when you want to start your $10 for 24-hour clock.  You get a notification that the 24 hour clock has started.  Easy.

Also before you leave

It turns out we did not need any of the above, but it was nice to know it was there.  Here is how (and this is much, much easier to do before you leave home):

  1. Enable Wi-Fi calling.  This is a feature that you should have on, anyway.  If your cellular signal is only 2 bars or below (including no bars / No Service) it will automatically route your call via the Wi-Fi network to which your phone is connected.  Brilliant.

  2. If you don’t already have it, download Google Maps from the App Store (this is not the Maps app, Waze or any other map app - Google Maps).  You will have to have a Google account for this to work (free at google.com).  Search for your destination city.  Once it finds it, scroll the screen up and look for the Download button.  Using your fingers choose the map area you want to download to your phone.  I was able to put the entire country of Ireland into one download (only about 350 MB).  If the countries you are traveling to do not fit in one download, you can repeat the directions and have multiple map downloads up to the limit of storage on your phone.  Hopefully you are not still struggling with a 16GB iPhone.

  3. Download a VPN.  What is a VPN?  Virtual Private Network.  This service (and software) does two things for you:

    • Protects your Internet traffic from bad guys while on public Wi-Fi networks (airports, hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, etc.).

    • Makes it appear that your iPhone is in another country.  Specifically for our purposes, it will make your iPhone appear that it is still in the United States.  This is very important as we will learn later.

I used TunnelBear VPN.  It is a free app that gives you a little bit of VPN data per month for free.  I bought their unlimited data plan for the month we were gone for $10.  There are lots of great VPNs in the App Store, however, including ExpressVPN. Read the reviews and decide for yourself.

It turned out that the three items above were all we needed to incur zero cell phone charges while abroad.  It worked really, really well.  Our phones remained in Airplane mode (with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth manually turned back on in Settings). Here is how we used them:

  1. Wi-Fi calling.  We could make or receive calls and check our voicemail whenever we were connected to Wi-Fi .  That is the trick - connecting to Wi-Fi.  We became very diligent about logging onto Wi-Fi wherever we were going to be for longer than about an hour (airports, restaurants, coffee shops, pubs and our hotel/condo).  Yes, there is a bit of fiddling and asking for the Wi-Fi password, but it works and it works well.  In Ireland Wi-Fi was in even the smallest of establishments and was very easy to access.

  2. Google maps worked flawlessly with the downloaded map.  We had full navigation, voice directions and rerouting when we missed a turn.  The only thing we did not have was traffic updates because there was no live Internet connection.  It was not a big deal.  (GPS is live even when Airplane mode is on so the phone knew our current location at all times.)

  3. VPN. It was surprising how useful this was.  Yes, I used it to provide a secure connection, but without using a VPN I was surprised at how many websites would not let me in when they realized I was trying to access their site from outside the USA.  With VPN enabled it looked like my phone was in the United States and I was immediately granted access to the site.  Very handy.  This included access to bank and streaming video websites.

I learned a lot about traveling abroad with a cell phone on our trip and wanted to pass it along to you.

Happy Travels!