If you’re in the UK you can switch to “3” and their contract includes “Feel at Home” which means you can leave data roaming on in loads of countries, including, France, Spain, USA, Hong Kong, Australia.
I switched over a year ago and although their UK network doesn’t have the coverage of O2, I pay £15 a month for a sim only contract and get 5000 texts, 2000 minutes and unlimited data at home and in many other countries.
The only practical limitation is that tethering isn’t allowed except in the UK.
actually i rechecked, contracts are as seen below :
Don’t know if easily opened from abroad and the actual requirements…
Data EU S: 50 MB à 5€/mois
Data EU M: 150 MB à 10€/mois
Data EU L: 500 MB à 25€/mois
Data EU XL: 1 GB à 50€/mois
Indeed the Voda Euro traveler is a good deal for UK residents if you’re not abroad too much each month 
For anybody living in Germany who regularly travels across Europe should consider the all-in option of the Telekom. Costs €5 a month and with that, you can use your free data allowance abroad AND make free phone calls from the country you are in back to german AND to other numbers in the country you are visiting without additional charge.
often through BT as it’s part of the package for home broadband.
OK – that’s a good one.
But then the basic data allowance is so cheap in the UK that there is relatively much less need for wifi in the UK, IMHO.
The persistent hassle seems to be how to combine local stuff with not paying way too much when travelling abroad.
I am a great believer in avoiding WIFI as much as possible. Last weekend, €140/night hotel in Lausanne, no wifi in the room… maybe in the lobby, so you buy drinks? It’s too much hassle. And when I did find it, it was the standard website redirection thing whereby nothing works until you start a web browser, go to some (any) website, it redirects you to its web interface, you have to click on some stuff, ignore some adverts, and only then do you get a usable connection. The days of free wifi are long gone, in the context of having it when you need it (e.g. to check wx, file flight plan etc).
I find wifi to be much more available than it used to be, and 3g roaming to be less important these days. Maybe it’s to do with where I visit, I have never been to Greece for example :)
In the UK I find my phone automatically logging on to wifi hotspots all over the place, often through BT as it’s part of the package for home broadband.
These telecom firms must be full of University of Upper Warlingham MBA types who spend their whole day working out how to screw each different portion of their customer base 
And the following week they do it all over again, differently…
Guess what I found out recently? Voda’s Euro Traveller works only on the “basic” allowance. So if you are on 1GB/month and you buy the 2GB add-on for a month and then go to say Greece, and use up 1.5GB, guess what happens? An even better one is when they give you free “unlimited data” for 3 months (the usual Voda pushy phone salesman chat line when they phone you up each year, ostensibly to offer you a better deal but really for the sole purpose of triggering a fresh 12 month contract – in the UK, the contracts become “rolling contracts” after the 12 months, which the telecomms companies hate because you can leave them without a penalty) and only the first 1GB of that is covered by Euro Traveller! And about 90% of the script monkeys in their call centre don’t know this, either…
IMHO there will never be a good solution which just works everywhere, much below the €40/month area, but that is IMHO an outrageous amount of money.
DATA ONLY plans with 10EUR/month 50MB /months in whole Europe.
The problem is that 50MB is way too little for a month, especially if you have friends bottom-feeding off your phone’s wifi because their Iphone contract has expensive roaming data A bit of bbc.co.uk or similar and 100MB is gone. I regularly went over the 500MB/month I used to have.
This is why Voda’s Euro Traveller is so good. £12/month, plus £3 for each day on which you use the phone abroad, and you get 1000MB/month, tethering, the lot. Unlimited voice and texts too, in the UK and when using ET i.e. calling/texting UK numbers. For another £5/month you get 100 worldwide texts per month and I have that too.
I don’t know if you can run that contract with a non UK bank. Probably not supported by their system.
For those who do voice calls, the best thing is VOIP. Any international call is likely to be €1+/minute (especially to a mobile) and I have had a few €100+ bills last year, calling Europe. Now I can make calls anywhere for about €0.01/minute (€0.07 to mobiles) over DIDlogic VOIP. Obviously, Voda hate it and they block port 5060, and they block the UDP packets if found on another port, and they ensure that the packet delays kill the protocol anyway. Most cellular firms do this now. So VOIP works mostly only over WIFI (hotel/cafe etc). Eventually I got Voda to re-enable it on my account (bizzarely they do it if you ask) but it works only on 3G+ (HSPA; 3 mbits/sec in the UK). If you can set up a VPN from your phone to a terminator somewhere free or very cheap then you can get around these issues, but VPNs on phones can be a real job to get working.
One thing to watch out for though. As soon as you enable the Personal Hotspot, this may be picked up by any devices that have previously used it. And this may be considered a Wifi connection by that device.
Indeed.
25MB for a day is quite little these days. Even just for checking out weather on a bit iffy day and filing fight plans could easily blast through that amount. That’s why I prefer to have more independent access.
I was away last weekend, and went through 60 odd MB for 1 & 1/2 days, and that didn’t involve any flying, so no weather checks. Just simple things like checking email, some website when waiting for flights, checking translations etc.
My big fear, as per BackPacker above, is connecting to my pc or iPad. It sees that Windows has released a load of updates, or a new iOS version is available, and they silently download it over the wifi connection (thinking it’s free) and tell you nothing until the 500MB download has completed. Things get even worse with programs such as dropbox on your pc which can easily change a few hundred MB of shared files without you knowing. Of course you can turn most of these off, but miss one, and you could be in trouble!
For those who can easily stay within the limits, then that’s great. I just thought I’d share a ‘discovery’ about data in France, that I’d not managed to find a solution for before. Presumably there are others like me who want to use more data, and struggled to find a solution in France which is pretty common elsewhere. Hopefully this is useful to those people
oh come on, don’t make me rewrite the full post…
tethering does not work at the moment, but only for iPhones and that with my Luxemburgish operator !
Actually just looked up their website for something else and saw they offer DATA ONLY plans with 10EUR/month 50MB /months in whole Europe.
I also noticed somewhere a 5MB/25EUR contract but no link, so not sure if it is currently available.
I should have said…. tethering does not work with the iPhone (apple stuff again )
Works fine for me. iPhone 5 with a Dutch Vodafone contract. The setting to allow tethering or not (called “Personal Hotspot” by Apple) is determined by your phone provider. It may not be enabled on the cheaper contracts. (VF NL explicitly mentions whether tethering is allowed or not on their web pages describing the different contracts.)
One thing to watch out for though. As soon as you enable the Personal Hotspot, this may be picked up by any devices that have previously used it. And this may be considered a Wifi connection by that device. A lot of bulk download apps can be configured to download stuff over Wifi automatically, but not over 3/4G, based on the assumption that Wifi is free or at least a flat rate, whereas 3/4G is billed by the byte.
This happened to me in Belgium. I turned on my Personal Hotspot for my GFs laptop to use. (I think we needed to download and print boarding passes or something like that.) The iPad in my bag picked this up, and started downloading the latest newspaper. This blew through my 25 MB data limit in seconds (4G connection…) and actually cost me about 16 euros in excess MBs before I was able to turn this off. Most expensive newspaper I ever bought – and I didn’t even read it.
I should have said…. tethering does not work with the iPhone (apple stuff again )
