One of the most difficult things to do when traveling out of the US working tradeshows is keeping your communications connections from bankrupting you.
You have no doubt heard horror stories about folks going to Europe and coming back with $1,200 cellular bills from roaming on data networks. And it’s true. The reason for this is simple. Without a special international voice plan you can be spending $1.49 to $2.49 per minute for a roaming voice call. And data is very expensive unless you do enough research to make a college senior studying for finals proud.
Generally the costs to stream an MP3 song will run you about €12 each because that is what 5 MB of data costs on this side of the pond. If you are lazy you can save a bit with your US local operator and buy a $5 plan that will lower your per minute voice charges to around $0.99 per minute, but that’s still going to keep you away from making anything but emergency calls. US operators like Verizon, used to offer $70 unlimited international data roaming packages, but concurrent with the launch of the iPhone, these plans have been replaced with a 20MB plan for $30 and a 100MB plan for $100. Somewhat of a safety net but it still leaves you concerned about syncing your mail and background data.
So what’s the backpacker equivalent of traveling with over the air (OTA) data? Like camping, you need to invest in some travel gear. Start with buying an unlocked GSM phone. If you get a smartphone, there is a bunch of ways to preload your contacts into it, and then you are ready to make calls. If you decide to do this, be aware that the transmission frequencies are different in different countries and different operators. For example in the US, both AT&T and T-Mobile have SIM based card systems but their antenna systems are on different frequencies. You can take a T-Mobile phone to Europe and still use your 3G high speed antennas in you unlocked phone almost anywhere. But if you take an unlocked phone on the AT&T system, you will only see a 2G connection. It’s like AM and FM radio. You can’t pick up FM stations if you have an AM radio. So get the right one for your trip. If you really decide to do this, there are web sites that note what antenna frequencies you need to get high speed wherever you are going. Just do a bit of research before you buy. Or rent.
Lets assume that you already have equipment, or you intend to. To drive the cost down as much as possible you need to give up your US number for the duration of the trip. Just email you temporary Spanish number to your contacts. They will call it if they really want to talk.
You can buy a local Spanish (or other country) operator SIM card with pay-as-you-go minutes. The best part about this is you completely control your costs. Every time you make a call the operator sends you a message that tells you how much you have left in your account. One of the big bonuses you get by doing this is that all incoming calls are free. Even international ones. This is really important because not only are your friends in the US waking you up at 2 am not realizing that you are in Spain, but you dodge the bullet of paying for the call. Like everywhere, operators compete and you can find bargains with pay as you go plans just like the locals do.
In Spain you have local choices of the big boys, Vodaphone and Movistar, or the street fighter, Yoigo. This is the third year I am using a set of Yoigo SIMs and although the plans have changed, it’s dirt cheap compared to the alternative. Calls are €0.12 a minute vs. the roaming alternative and data is €0.0012/KB and they are capped at € 3.00 a day. Try getting that daily rate in an overseas hotel. After about 10MB the wonderful data rate drops to some unusable GPRS rate for the rest of the day. You also get the benefit of having local hotels and concierges calling you back. No one here is going to make an international call at international rates to answer your questions here in Spain. Having a local number allows them to call you without fear.
You can get these SIMs at the local The Phone House store locations, conveniently located all around Barcelona many with English speaking personnel. Except on Sunday. No one is open on Sunday. If you land on a Sunday, stay in your hotel and stay off the phone.
In the past I would take one of the Yoigo SIMs and put it into an unlocked USB modem (I found an unlocked Novatel Wireless MC950D on eBay for under $100 with shipping from Australia) and insert this into a Cradlepoint CTR500 with an external battery hanging from a cable adapter which will make the single data connection from the modem into a moving WI-FI hotspot that could share 64 connections from that single SIM. It looked stupid but it worked.
It sounds crazy but I was doing streaming media demos with eight phones and I wasn’t going to get eight SIMs and manage them all during MWC. Distributed reliable Wi-Fi was the answer.
This year I found something that for data use is far easier and more consistent on the data side than doing it yourself. XCOM GLOBAL of San Diego has a new unlimited roaming data plan for travel in 30 countries for a fixed price. You can rent their Mi-Fi unit at a flat rate of $17.95 a day for up to 5 simultaneously connected units for a single country. This means that you can set up a full set of services in your native language (don’t knock that. If you haven’t tried to buy a SIM in a Vodaphone store in Spain you have no idea) have everything delivered to your door 2 days before the trip, ready and working from the time you land at your destination.
This has been an AWESOME alternative to managing the whole process myself, or trying to explain it to someone else. The XCOM unit arrived on time, and I was able to set up a password and associate the access point before I left for the airport for 5 devices. Amazingly they all worked on arrival with the single XCOM unit. Having the slim device with a built in battery made it easy to leave it on and in my coat jacket at the show. I switched my smartphones to only update through a Wi-Fi connection, which allowed me to pull email and messages as often as needed. It also allowed me to get a personal connection when the “free Cisco Wi-Fi” provided by the conference was completely saturated rendering that service useless during most of the show hours.
So now I had cheap ways of making and taking local calls, cheap ways of taking international calls, I could receive Skype in and other calls, and could use Skype and Google Voice to take calls with the XCOM unit. I wasn’t making calls because I like my friends and wasn’t going to wake them at all hours of the night just because I could.
So where am I six hours after the show has ended? I started with a one-year old SIM that should have expired in six months of non-use. The Phone House folks simply added €20 to the old existing card saving me from buying a new one and keeping my old Spanish phone number.
Somehow I still seem to have €15 left on my SIM with two days to go before my flight back to the states. And I’ll owe Xcom $180 for 10 days of carefree usage. And I mean I was really using the data connection. I pushed hundreds of megabytes of images, audio and video through that thing. If that isn’t the closest thing to data backpacking through a data youth hostel, I don’t know what else you might call it.
You can contact XCOMglobal at www.xcomglobal.com If you sign up for the newsletter a week before you need the service, they will send you a code that waves the two way shipping charges, saving another $30.
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