When in Rome, I’m covered. But when roaming in the USA, things revert to the bad old days of crippling data costs – or going back to basics
Barry Collins is a former editor of PC Pro and has just completed his 13th CES. You would think he’d have got the hang of roaming by now. @bazzacollins
Preparing for a trip to Las Vegas is always fraught with dilemmas. Do I need a raincoat, just in case? Which of my 18 international plug adapters should I pack? One feather boa or two? However, one problem I thought I’d managed to quash for this year’s CES jaunt (see p26 for the tech highlights) was roaming data. “Thought” being the operative word.
I use the blisteringly cheap Lebara as my mobile network here in the UK: the 15GB of data I get for £6.95 per month is cracking value, not least because Lebara throws in free EU roaming. In the US, however, it’s a different matter. Last year, Lebara didn’t even offer roaming data bundles for the trip to Vegas, meaning any data I used over there would be charged at some ridiculous rate per MB, where downloading an email attachment would cost you more than a two-bed flat in Didcot.
I swerved this by ordering an international SIM from SimCorner. This gave me 6GB of data for £27.50, and turned up a few days before I departed, meaning I could pop the SIM in my phone’s secondary SIM slot, activate it when I got to Vegas, and switch off roaming.
This worked perfectly. I could still receive calls on my normal SIM, WhatsApp didn’t throw a paddy because I’d switched SIMs (as it would have done if my phone didn’t have a second SIM slot), and I wasn’t constantly worrying that streaming a playlist from Spotify would force my company into liquidation.
I was all set to order again from SimCorner this year, when Lebara slid into my inbox with good news. It now had roaming bundles for the US. A 2GB SIM covering eight days would cost me a tenner; I use 3GB to 4GB most months here in the UK, so 2GB seemed plenty. There would be no faffing around with SIM cards, and I could put the saved £17.50 towards a down payment on a latte (Vegas has become unbelievably expensive).
Everything was hunky dory, until I got to my Vegas hotel room, fired up the Lebara app to check everything was working smoothly with the roaming bolt-on – and received a nasty shock. Despite having done nothing more than order an Uber since I’d touched down in Vegas, I’d smashed through roughly a fifth of my 2GB data allowance, according to Lebara’s in-app coun
