The Best International Roaming Options for Travelers

You’ve checked your passport expiration, looked into visa requirements, and sorted out your flights for that big international trip. Now what are you going to do about that computer in your pocket? How are you going to use that smartphone when you’re not on Wi-Fi, when you’re just walking around or riding in a car? You need to sort out your international roaming options and pick one that’s going to keep you connected. 

In a perfect world you would be able to land in a new country and just use your phone like you do at home. Some people get on a plane assuming that they can and this becomes the first on their list of rookie travel mistakes. It’s seldom that simple because the company you’re paying at home is not the one who owns the towers and infrastructure you’ll use in that country abroad.

Thankfully they’re a lot more cooperative these days though if you plan ahead. If you are contracted with a certain specific carrier in the USA, you actually can just travel abroad with your current plan and do nothing. More on that below.

Phone connectivity abroad was a difficult subject to give advice on 10 or 15 years ago, when using your smartphone in another country was either expensive or a royal pain. Now it’s getting far easier thanks to simple data plan access. You don’t need to pop open your phone, insert a card, or switch numbers.

Whether it’s with storage gadgets, electronics chargers, or how we play our music, eventually we go from 20 different choices that don’t work well together to just a few that follow common standards. That’s where we are now with international roaming for travelers. You can basically opt for a plan with one international company that covers you nearly everywhere or purchase some kind of eSim plan and app where you pay for what you use and top it up as needed. 

We’ll start with the second option, which is what you’ll need if your cell phone plan is with AT&T, Verizon, Rogers, Telcel, or most other North American companies not called T-Mobile. 

International Roaming From eSim Companies

In the not-so-distant past, the 2010s, you needed to buy an individual physical Sim card for each country where you were visiting or you had to pay your home carrier an exorbitant per-day charge for international roaming. The only real other option was to contract with some company selling multi-country Sim cards that would, for instance, cover most (seldom all) of the countries in Europe or a group of them in Asia. 

The Sim cards were computer chips, the kind of card the company puts in your phone when you sign up for a plan with them and get your phone number. For most Android phones you could easily do this yourself, popping open the case and switching out the cards (don’t lose the old one!) or adding the new one to a second slot. For iPhones you needed a “genius” to do it though, or at least some teenager in a kiosk by the train station or in the local market. 

Sometimes we would actually carry two phones: our normal one that had our regular number, then a cheapo additional phone for expats or long-term travelers, one that we’d stick a local Sim card into. I went through a few of these in Mexico. 

Now the cards have become virtual ones and there’s nothing physical to insert. You just sign up with a company, install some kind of app, and pay them. Just like that, you’ve got international roaming with Airtel, with Airalo, or some other company—not your carrier. It’s then easy to switch back and forth between the Sim when you need it and your regular plan when you don’t. You keep your same phone number and it’s seamless for social media, WhatsApp, and other services.

So how to you find an eSim company to sign up with? Well, do your homework of course to figure out how good Airtel is or what customers are saying about Gigsky, Airalo, Truely, Saily, Holafly, or the dozen others to choose from. Overall though, most people seem to be happy with the ease and the value of eSim apps. Depending on whose research you believe, this is already a $6 billion to $9 billion market and many projections have it doubling or tripling by the end of the decade.  

With all this competition, the prices are quite reasonable. For 5GB of data and 30 days to use it, prices range from $8 to $15 for a single country, $16 to $30 for a whole region—such as 39 countries in Europe. To put that in perspective, here’s what Verizon charges: $10 every day if you pay them for an international roaming plan! 

Roaming the World With T-Mobile

T-Mobile, by contrast, won’t charge you anything to use data when you’re traveling. I always get a ping of satisfaction when my plane lands in a new country, I turn off the airplane mode, and a new message pops up as we taxi toward the terminal.

It says something to the effect of, “Welcome to _____. Don’t worry, you can keep using your phone with 5GB of high-speed data per month. Texts are free, phone calls are 25 cents per minute.” (If you wait until you’re on Wi-Fi and use WhatsApp, Zoom, Google Meet, or Skype, the phone calls are free too.)

Here’s how they put it on their website: “Our plans are also international plans. Your phone just works when you arrive. No setup required.”

This is despite the fact that I have a U.S. family plan for three people that costs me $134 per month, far less than most Americans pay because most plans have the cost of the phone itself built in, the financing. So when people say, “I get a free iPhone upgrade this month,” what they really mean is, “I’ve paid off my iPhone through AT&T’s financing and now I get to do it all over again.”

You can finance your phone purchase with T-Mobile too, but you pay a whole lot less if you don’t. (If you’re coming to them from another carrier though, you’ll get a trade-in credit for switching.)

So I can use all functions of my phone freely in Mexico and Canada just like I do in the USA, but then I can also keep using data normally when I’m almost anywhere else.

Plus it’s not like it stops working if we use up the 5GB each of data each in a month while traveling. It’s just that we get hobbled after that until the calendar resets, with the data speed dropping to 256Kbps. This rarely happens since I wait until I’m on Wi-Fi for most of the streaming or photo/video uploads.

There are two caveats to this T-Mobile situation though, one of them edging me toward adding an eSim card for my next trip to Europe. 

1) There are a few exceptions to the worldwide coverage list. Not many, but I’ve had to make local arrangements or do without data in Fiji and Nepal, the two countries that didn’t work for me in the past decade of travel with T-Mobile .

2) The data is definitely not full-on 4G or 5G automatically. In some countries it drops down to a speed that feels like mobile data in the early days of smartphones if you’re outside of North America. No biggie if you’re just checking e-mail, but tough if you’re walking around Buenos Aires looking at a map and you’ve gone two blocks in the wrong direction before the map catches up. You can solve that by paying more:

In all fairness, they have been improving this in some places. They now say on their website that you can get high-speed data in 11 European countries and that the speed keeps going up. Then if you’re willing to pony up to their highest-paid plan, you can get 5G speeds anywhere they’re available. 

How about you? What has been your experience with international roaming abroad?