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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

Highest roaming fee on a network I've connected to with Vodafone UK (On Air Aerospace) was £7.20 per MB (about $10)

That would make it $200+ to load the page including the advert.

Highest I've actually paid was in China at £3 per megabyte, and not only did I use normal phone stuff like data and email, because the UK network I was on allowed connections to my company, but the local wifi didn't, when I accidentally connected plugged in my phone without disabling tethering, the laptop started downloading stuff - ran up a $400 bill in about a minute before the flood of text messages I get every 5MB started to arrive (out of order) and I realised what was going on.

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Those are horrible fees. You can buy local sims for cheap when travelling to avoid those roaming fees.

Or even just get t-mobile if you're based in the US, which has free roaming in many international locations

T-Mobile US' international roaming was almost useless when I was in Japan before the pandemic. Coverage was good on SoftBank, but even with five bars, my latest-and-greatest T-Mobile 4GLTE hotspot would only connect as 3G, and the speed was closer to dialup.

It seemed more of a marketing gimmick than a useful tool.

I had terrible problems with T-Mobile US international roaming in Japan also. I was able to make calls and recieve calls, however I was not able to use internet.

After basic troubleshooting T-Mobile requested that I call their international support on a 2nd phone and they would happily help me fix the problem with the original mobile phone.

Of course I didn't have access to a 2nd phone, I was livid. Cancelled the contract with T-Mobile and got local service. Even in cancelling T-Mobile couldn't get it right, they sent me two additional bills for trivial amounts in the months that followed. Each bill under a dollar.

I'm no longer with T-Mobile US but I used it in Peru, Iceland, Mexico, Morocco, Brazil, Bolivia, and Italy without issue. Maybe Japan is a fluke but working service in North Africa and South America speaks volumes for me.

I think the basic problem here is that there's essentially no overlap between the LTE bands used by T-Mobile in the US and Softbank in Japan.

Unless you have a device with radios that happen to support extra bands that are not used in the US, then it's essentially incompatible with the Japanese network despite both being "LTE".

I disagree, it's a great tool - T-Mobile has roaming agreements with Softbank, NTT and DoCoMo, not KDDI.

The biggest issue is the phone bands, if your phone does not support the local bands, it will not connect.

I had no issue having a secondary phone in Japan w/ my T-mobile sim and having a local NTT sim. With dual sim/esim even easier nowadays to run both networks.

I don't rely on their international roaming to do hotspot work, but it suffices to check HN, use google maps to get around, and order uber if I am in a place w/o amazing mass transit.

Your device is not compatible on Japanese LTE.

I couldn't disagree more. Of course T-mobile's free roaming isn't going to be super fast. You can pay extra 4G/5G. But if you're hopping across countries, it's great. It's obviously not made for instagram/youtube.

T-Mobile's free 128kbs is enough for whatapp, navigation and a few emails (Their MAX plan gives free 256kbs).

It actually gives you 5G in Canada and Mexico for free, which is particularly useful to me.

In international locations to your point it gets you enough for Maps and Mail, and some basic web browsing. You won't be streaming, that's for sure. However, if I need more than that, I use it to bootstrap an e-sim like GigSky which you can then route all data traffic to (at least on iOS) via Cellular settings.

This way you keep your phone number, iMessage, texting, and get 5G data too.

Local sims in Beijing which will bust through the great firewall back to base for my 16 hour stay that I can just pick up for cash?

You can pick them up for cash but often times they will ask to see your passport. They don't bust through the great firewall but in my experience foreign sims don't seem to either.

google fi busted through GFW when I last went there in 2017

I've been traveling a lot and what I've done is setup an AT&T based MVNO on my iPhone's eSIM, freeing up the physical slot for local SIMs. With WiFi calling enabled on my AT&T line, I can go around the world spending peanuts compared even to Google Fi, while keeping my US number working.

"On Air Aerospace" being an inflight roaming [1] provider like AeroMobile, right?

I recall getting a text about that £7.20 fee during a flight a couple years ago.

[1]: https://www.aeromobile.net/inflight-roaming/

Better to get a Ubigi or Truphone eSim, much cheaper data roaming if you're not willing to get a local SIM.

I've found GigSky cheaper than Truphone, but ill check out Ubigi

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