Data and Sim for Roadtripping Europe – Ask the right questions

Why do we need Data?

OK, so we have arrived in the UK! Hooray, so great to see my best friend again (even though it was not long between visits this time).

We arrived on a long weekend which was nice, it ensured we relaxed and adjusted time zones.  We would not choose the early morning flight from Australia again, much easier last time when we left late at night.  Not to mention not having to wake up at 2:30am to get ready and get to the airport!

Anyway, back to the focus of this blog post, Data.  Obviously we all love to have access to the internet for a variety of reasons.  We have our blog, schooling for Miss B and I do some remote assistance for my old job (not in order of importance LOL!)   Youtube clip available here.

You will also need to be checking multiple camp sites, discounts for entry to various attractions and organising meetups with other worldschoolers and followers. 

So, we had a spare mobile phone that we use for international sims. We are situated around Southend on Sea and spoke to 3 Network and Vodafone.

What we need

Access to local calls in the UK and mainland Europe.

Internet Data of at least 20GB a month.

Be able to Tether to all our devices.

Must be able to top up easily on the road.

Must work for the entire duration of our trip.  Do it once, do it right.

What you need to ask?

The most important things to consider or ask when selecting a Pay as you Go plan are:

1. Can we tether the data to other devices  (sharing the internet across multiple devices)
2. When we take the phone to the mainland of Europe (from UK) do we still get the same amount of data as stated on the plan while in UK  
3. Are the countries you are travelling to included in the roaming/coverage areas
4. How do we renew or top up at the end of each month

3 Network

It was disappointing to find that the sales person would have been happy to sell us any plan or pay as you go option irrespective if it suited our requirements or not. 

Luckily we had done our research before we left home and knew that some telecommunication companies do not allow tethering – 3 network are one of them.  That aside they also reduce the amount of data you do have on the phone if you go to the mainland!

They also have an expiry of two months in duration for their pay as you go plans. So we would of been overseas and suddenly no data.

They offered the suggestion to buy another plan of a broadband plan on top, we were getting close to 48 pound at this stage which would still not last the distance of our trip.  We were a little surprised and miffed at this point.  We had to extract the information by bringing up every possible scenario.  

No surprises here, we did not go with them.

Vodafone

So off we went to Vodafone, with our list of questions. 

Lauren was fabulous, all our questions were answered and yes they tether both inside the UK and outside, with the same amount of data irrespective of where we are.

We were able to pay 30 pound a month up front and get all the top up keys both handed to us and a follow up email in case we misplaced them.

Such fabulous service! We were all done, shown how to top up, fixed our phone settings to make sure all was working ok. 

We will check over the next five months to see if it all lives up to our expectations but last year we used Skyroam and were not happy with the coverage, speed and cost.  We did bring it with us again as we still have days available on it and a great backup.  We wanted a better solution and we hope we have found it.

Until next time….