This week I had the pleasure of being on the Daily Tech News Show which was hosted by Sarah Lane and Robb Dunewood. As the guest, I got to pick the topic so I decided to walk through just a couple of my Tech on Travel – the Africa Edition. You heard most of it during the NosillaCast of course.
On the show, I talked about my diagram (and Robb called me an engineer), then I told them about Steve’s image-stabilized binoculars, and I wound up the piece by talking about doing backups. I explained that you can connect a backup SSD to an iPhone or an Android phone via USB-C and directly back them up without carrying a laptop.
That was what I was prepared to chat about, but we ended up talking a bit about eSIMs. It might have been in the after show they call Good Day Internet, but I mentioned that we each bought eSIMs from GigSky for $48 for 30 days for 10GB (I might have said $40 but it was really $48). I said we didn’t use our AT&T lines because you can buy a kidney for what they charge. I said it was $20 per day per phone line.
Alert listener Jess wrote into the show and explained that my information was out of date. AT&T no longer charges $20/day, it’s only $12/day, and if you have a second person traveling who’s on your plan, the second line is only $6/day. So for two phones, it’s $18/day, not $40/day like I said. But even better, the max they charge you for is 10 days within a billing cycle. That’s a huge improvement.
I went to the AT&T website to read the info myself (trust but verify, right?) and found that Jess was absolutely right. So then I thought I’d run a little math.
Let’s Do the Math
We bought two eSIMs from GigSky for $48 each. This got us 10GB for 30 days. As our trip was 23 days long this worked pretty well. 10GB was plenty of data for Steve, but I ran out a day or two before the end of our trip. I suspect it was uploading all of my RAW photos, or the fact that I forgot to turn off Backblaze before we left! In any case, the GigSky plans let us tether, so I just mooched off Steve’s phone for the last couple of days.
So our total cost was:
2 phones at $48 each = $96 on GigSky
On AT&T, the cost $12/day for me and $6/day for Steve, with a max of 10 days charged per billing cycle. That would be $180 for the two of us for 10 days.
That’s nearly double the cost of GigSky even with this better deal, but it might be worth it to have our real phone number and unlimited data like we have at home. However, there’s a catch in the AT&T plan. Remember Jess explained they only charge for 10 days per billing cycle.
Our billing cycle is from the 22nd of the month to the 21st. We left on August 10 and returned on the September 2. That means we spanned 10 days into not one, but two billing cycles.
So our total cost with AT&T would have been:
20 days x ($12 + $6) = $360.
$360 for AT&T is 3.75 times as much as we paid for GigSky. After that analysis, I think for this particular trip, it was far better to use GigSky than AT&T.
However, if we go on a shorter trip, that maybe doesn’t span two billing periods, AT&T has an offering that’s no longer heinous. It’s annoying that you have to be wary of your billing cycle before making the right financial decision for you but it’s worth doing the math before deciding.
One more thing. People had told me that if you have T-Mobile, you can use your phone in other countries without paying extra. I did a little bit of digging on that on the T-Mobile website, and it’s not quite as rosy as it sounds.
With their higher-priced plans liked Go5G Next & Plus, you get up to 5GB of “high-speed data” (which they don’t define), but then it drops down to 256Kbps. On their lower-priced plans like Go5G, the only data you get is 256Kbps.
They have a third tier of pricing labeled “Other T-Mobile plans” where they don’t specify the speeds. For that third tier, there’s a fee of $0.01/MB. The 10GB I used on GigSky for $48 would have cost me $100 on T-Mobile “other” plans.
I’m really glad Jess wrote in to tell me that I was behind the times on the latest fees from the bigger carriers. I’m equally glad to know that I didn’t needlessly light dollar bills on fire going with the eSIMs we bought. The lesson I learned was that in preparation for travel, I should keep an eye on my local service provider just in case they have a good deal.
In any case, check out Daily Tech News Show 4858 – Travel Flow Charts at dailytechnewsshow.com/…
We are on an old T-Mobile plan and it allows the same free internet when traveling outside of USA.
In the past 4-5 years, we’ve used the service in USA, Vietnam, Japan, Korea, India, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, France, Slovenia, England, and Spain.
We get warned via text message when dropping down to the lower speed tier.
Either speed is fine, as long as photo uploads are deferred for WiFi connections.