On a previous trip I took a different phone from my usual one and bought a sim from 3 with a view to using their ‘FeelAtHome’ package. It worked very badly. So this time I decided on a different course.
I made sure my iPhone 6 was unlocked and bought an AT&T ‘GoPhone’ sim from an AT&T outlet in Washington. This cost $50 and gave me unlimited phone calls and texts for a month, and crucially 3 Gb of mobile data. This “just worked”, as they say; I had good 4G coverage pretty much everywhere I went. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw it drop into non-4G functionality; there were a couple of places out in Virginia (e.g. on the Skyline Drive) where there was no coverage at all, but that was only to be expected.
Data was my main interest in doing this – I wanted good performance from Google Maps, plus emails & various bits of social media – and I got this. I experienced good speeds, and never felt that it was going slow. A couple of times I used the phone as a tether for the iPad, and that worked very well. In the event I made just one call (to a hotel to confirm a reservation) and probably no texts, and in 9 days used just over 1 Gb of the data, so you could argue that it was not a cheap experiment. But it gave me much, much better performance than the Windows phone that I took to New York had managed, and I got a lot of peace of mind knowing that I was able to communicate. And of course it was much cheaper than using my EE sim from the UK would have been.
Here’s a link to an AT&T page about GoPhone plans. I bought the $45 a month package (for just one month, of course – cash transaction). It came to $50 and a few cents because I had to pay for the actual sim as well.
One final point – you do need to make sure that the phone you’re taking can receive 4G in the US. We got Val’s old iPhone 5s unlocked and then discovered that the particular model she had, A1457, only supported LTE bands 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8 & 20. That’s fine for the U.K. – for example, EE use bands 3, 7, and 20, but in the US AT&T use bands 2, 4, 17 & 30 (and apparently band 2 is just a fall-back band), so we would never have got 4G with Val’s old phone. Other iPhone 5s models cover more LTE bands than Val’s. I have a feeling that the restricted phone was supplied to U.K. network providers for contract buyers while the more comprehensive phones were perhaps supplied by Apple direct. Similarly, there are a number of Android phones that use very restrictive LTE bands, e.g. the Wileyfox Spark which only supports bands 3, 7 and 20, which is absolutely fine in the U.K. and Europe but won’t provide 4G in the US at all. (I suspect that the more premium Android phones, e.g. a Samsung S7, cover more bands.) So the message is – check the specifications of your precise model of phone very carefully if you’re visiting the US.
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