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Comment by brewdad | Hacker News Reader

My son will be traveling to Europe this summer for a school trip. He'll be spending time in 6 or 7 different countries (UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and a couple more I can't remember right now)

Is there a better option than Fi for this type of trip?

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Roaming charges inside of the EU were eliminated in 2017, so a single prepaid SIM (readily available for a few dollars) would do him well inside of the EU. Make sure that he has a phone that's not vendor locked. That doesn't include Switzerland, and may not include the UK by the summer, but the SIM will still work there, just with additional charges (which are usually fairly reasonable).

On a recent trip to Europe, I found this prepaid SIM a much better value than Fi:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01FI1JW72/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_b...

Any prepaid sim will let you roam, if you’re really worried get one from Three and it will work in the states too. Local calls will be routed back to the country where the sim came from, so actually using the phone for traditional voice calls will be pricey. Lebara UK has a cheap plan with 100 international minutes and a few gigs of data for like £10/30 days (last time I used it) and can be bought from any phone shop

edit I checked the Lebara data rates and it’s all included in the normal quota, except for Switzerland at £15/MB, so... maybe not

Definitely get a cheap sim card wherever he lands. The EU abolished all roaming charges for data and calls so he'll be able to use whatever data and calls he has in all EU countries.

Some countries have extremely good value pre paid sim cards with 20 gigs of data often coming in under €20 a month.

No roaming charges between members of EU. So, if he lands first in UK, don't buy the sim from there

I've been to Europe a few times lately and I'm a massive fan of Vodafone's coverage and offerings. The only issue I had was the lack of tethering on a prepaid SIM, but the free wifi everywhere I went was normally good enough to use for anything I needed.

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