This is not about EU roaming so I’ve started a new thread. I’m sure Peter will combine it if he thinks that better.
I’ve been using 3 ‘Feel at home’ during US trips for some time. It’s great for voice – always works – with both PAYG and contract SIMs. However, many FBO’s and flight schools don’t like or are barred from calling you back on a UK mobile no., so I also carry a lovely little LG PAYG flip-phone from Tracfone ($20 in Walmart with airtime) for calling US numbers with an area code at my home base.
3’s ‘Feel at home’ is very poor for data though. It can work on the ground, but is never useable while flying. This is crucial, because Foreflight’s real time weather radar is the best thing since sliced bread. I’ve tried many brands of ‘buy it here, use it there’ sims from ebay vendors but these are always MVNO (3rd party) carriers and usually not much better than the 3 solution.
What works is a bona fide AT&T sim direct from an AT&T retail outlet and these are springing up everywhere. It used to be that you had to have a US ZIP code with US credit card and this made purchasing a nightmare experience of buying gift cards in Walmart and using fake addresses etc.. Not now. You can walk into an AT&T store and buy in only a few minutes a genuine PAYG data SIM using a UK credit card for $20 / 1 month/ 2Gb. No fake addresses, just pay and go. Almost. Except their chip n’ pin machines still don’t accept UK credit cards, but they can override that.
Coverage in the air at VFR levels is about 30% of the time on average and an availability every 10 mins or so in less populated areas where signal is better near habitations. Of course, there are areas of no signal, especially in the E coast flatlands. The Foreflight radar has to be seen to be believed and for VFR flying a 10 min update time is very useful as you adapt your route to negotiate storm cells or lines of storms. There doesn’t seem to be any significant latency and what you see on Foreflight seems to agree closely with what ATC will tell you about if you ask.
T-mobile SIMs probably offer similar coverage but traditionally have not been as good in rural areas. They have the advantage of working in UK so that you can test things, while the AT&T sims and Tracfone (which is on AT&T) absolutely don’t work here. So if you are planning to fly in the US this summer I recommend an AT&T store as your first port of call on arrival (there might even be one in the airport).
No, I don’t work for AT&T or anyone else mentioned here!
For what it’s worth, I’ve never been happier to switch (back) to Vodafone for Three.
Because of the speed of the data which was barely usable,but with Vodafone I’d save a ton of money in europe since few countries were feel at home. The 5 GBP I pay per say in the US / HKG far outweight the poor connection quality 3 has (which pretty much barred me from making VOIP calls, raising costs due to having to do international calls, but mostly frustration).
I use a T-Mobile SIM in the USA. I’ve found it’s fine on the ground everywhere (including the rural places I’ve stopped at – usually airfields in the middle of nowhere), but pretty spotty in the air.
I’ve been flying a plane with Sirius XM weather anyway, so I don’t really care that much about airborne data.
Second @Aveling, ATT works pretty well in the air. One caveat, though – if you keep it running ForeFlight you can almost hear the gurgling sound of a battery being drained! For anything longer than an hour or two it’s imperative to carry a charger or one of these power banks.
Have to disagree with @Noe here. The ‘Feel at Home’ (or whatever they call it these days) is now available in about 60 countries and I’ve never had an issue with data speeds. In the beginning (I switched from Vodafone many – 10+ – years ago) the service was a bit patchy, but not anymore.
T-Mobile vs ATT: most people here agree that the T-Mobile service isn’t as good in rural areas as ATT, but these things are in constant flux, so perhaps check a coverage chart of the area(s) you will need it in before making that decision.
I can use my German Vodafone contract incl. the data plan for an extra € 5,99 per day in the USA. Not exactly cheap but acceptable to me …
Alexis wrote:
I can use my German Vodafone contract incl. the data plan for an extra € 5,99 per day in the USA. Not exactly cheap but acceptable to me …
Yes, but then people who call YOU have to call Germany. As @Aveling correctly points out, many are either reluctant or not able to do so.
German Vodafone contract incl. the data plan for an extra € 5,99 per day in the USA
That is the old Vodafone UK World Traveller which was £5/day last time I looked.
They also did a Euro Traveller for £3/day which made a really huge difference to European travelling in recent years (rendering the usual perpetual search for wifi, or PAYG SIM card shops, pointless) but now with the new EU regs that is finished and they give you a monthly roaming allowance instead. The World Traveller will probably just keep going…
Vodafone is a top grade company. They cost a bit more than anybody else but once you have spent a few hours on the phone to a monkey-script call centre in India for one of the others you will probably never go back. The others hang in there, offering various cheap deals which are cheap and then stop being cheap or simply don’t work properly. I have just bought a Voda contract SIM for a second phone for £8.50/month which compares well with £6/month for the cheapest option: an absolutely dire sh1tty-service outfit (Life Mobile, running on the back of EE) which barely worked and eventually stopped altogether. Of course I hold shares in Vodafone but with them being 3% of the FTSE100 so does almost everybody else who has a pension in Europe 
but then people who call YOU have to call Germany
I don’t think there is a solution to that, presently. You need a second (American) SIM and either two phones or a dual-SIM phone. Well – apart from setting up inbound VOIP on an American landline number and (in this case) on a German landline number, as per the other thread, but that isn’t so easy. I’ve never met anyone who has this working.
I did actually look at a dual-SIM version of the Samsung S7 when buying my S7 and found there were various gotchas with the dual SIM version – basically to do with 4G existing on many bands and the dual SIM phone would not work as well around the UK and Europe. IIRC, a lot of those phones come from the Far East and are configured for that region. The bottom line was that in some places you would get 3G only, or just GPRS (which works everywhere but is useless except for instant messaging) but it was impossible to work out where because it would depend on roaming deals.
Realistically, for the US you really need a second phone (which costs next to nothing these days or just use on of the prob90 many you have lying about the house) and a US SIM / number. Forget all these ‘World Traveller’ or similar malarkey, nobody’s gonna call you on a UK/German/whatever phone.
Can you have Whatsapp tied to two numbers at the same time?
172driver wrote:
Realistically, for the US you really need a second phone (which costs next to nothing these days or just use on of the prob90 many you have lying about the house) and a US SIM / number. Forget all these ‘World Traveller’ or similar malarkey, nobody’s gonna call you on a UK/German/whatever phone.
Yes, and in addition the less expensive of US phone plans don’t work for calls outside of the US… including ours. It can be beneficial to have phones for both continents regardless of where you live. Our solution is as you suggest an old iPhone 3 with a German SIM card, used for very occasional phone calls to Europe when Skype is an issue, and also used when in Europe. Before that I had an Italian TIM number.
