[Someone1234]

I am on T-Mobile and travelled outside the US late last year.

First off, I just want to say, the "free tier" of international data is extremely appreciated for two important reasons:

- Overage is literally impossible (i.e. no "bill shock").

- If you don't wish to pay, you get "something" for nothing.

So, now, the "bad." The reality is that T-Mobile's free tier is incredibly slow like "my 56K modem was faster than this" slow. A single modern web-site can literally take so long to load that my phone would fall asleep and then cut off the connection (meaning I'd have to start all over).

It is really only useful for push notifications and to check your email if you're really patient. Even for reading sites like Reddit, it would drive you up the wall. Looking at images (e.g. imgur) is a no-go and YouTube is definitely not even plausible.

Now, if you pay, you get more data per dollar than you do on most other big US networks and you legitimately get 4G speeds in many places (at least I certainly did). So if you pay you wouldn't even know you were abroad. And when you run out of paid data, you drop down to the slow speed again rather than being cut off (which is nice, so you feel safe to use 100% of your paid data with no risk).

So, to me, T-Mobile's free tier doesn't really change the formula for international travel. It just solves overage/bill shock and gives you some basic notifications and maybe email. Those aren't things to be sniffed at, they're legitimately nice, but people should manage their expectations.

PS - Protip: Restart your phone every single time you change countries. My phone got "confused" and would refuse to connect until I restarted. We did a cruise so a new country was daily, and I missed a day of data because I thought that country simply wasn't supported (rather than it being a phone problem).

[r00fus]

Where did you travel to? When we went to France, I got great speeds (almost 3G-ish) roaming on several providers there (IIRC, SFR and Bouygues) in all sorts of locations, including very remote ones.

In the end, we paid $40 (all for calls @ $0.20/min) for 3 weeks of near-normal usage with 2 iPhones.

To me that's very much a game changer - previously I paid double that same amount as an accidentally access charge (forgot to turn off roaming on my AT&T phone). Not to mention I had to spend 30m with the AT&T rep to configure our accounts so we wouldn't get charged $2/min prior to our trip.

[noobermin]

I have to echo this comment. I recently travelled to Japan and Singapore, and I managed really well on the 3G speeds I got from T-mobile's free roaming. I'll admit I didn't spend my time there streaming youtube videos, but I did use instagram and occasionally google maps, although it was slow for maps sometimes (then again, maps is slow here in the US too, it's most likely my SG SIII not playing well with the latest and greatest maps version), moreover, I tethered from time to time. At the end, I paid a pittance (something like $2) because I had to make one call. For me, T-mobile's free roaming was a godsend.

[discordance]

I usually cache google maps offline when traveling to another country: https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/3273567?hl=en

[Someone1234]

> Where did you travel to?

It was this cruise but in reverse (Aruba last, cayman first):

Ports: Ft. Lauderdale, Florida | Aruba | Cartagena, Colombia | Panama Canal, Panama (Gatun Lake) | Colon, Panama | Limon, Costa Rica | Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands | Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

When I paid for data I got good 3G or 4G speeds. With free data it was incredibly slow, like sub-56K modem slow, even at the same ports as the 4G speeds with paid.

Here's a YouTube video someone else took which accurately represents my experience:

https://youtu.be/PISKCPFu3iU?t=26s

It takes a minute to load Gizmoto's homepage.

[lmz]

If you don't mind your connection being proxied there's always Opera Mini.

[kissickas]

Absolutely correct about restarting your phone. I even restart mine twice after I change SIM cards (not a T-Mobile guy).

What's your experience with Google Maps at the free 2G speeds? That would be my first question when it comes to travel.

[ngoldbaum]

Fun thing to keep in mind when traveling in mainland China: maps for use outside China are shifted by a few hundred meters, presumably in a lame attempt to confuse an invading army.

https://polastre.com/2013/02/what-the-map/

[stingrae]

I have not run into this issue in China, perhaps this has changed since.

[Someone1234]

> What's your experience with Google Maps at the free 2G speeds?

"Unpleasant." What I'd strongly recommend is to download the map using offline maps before you leave. If you wait for Google Maps to download the data over the 2G/free tier you'll be in for a very long (10+ minute) wait.

I did not do offline maps before I left, but mostly we were on tours so we didn't really need them. But if I was e.g. exploring a city or doing something on my own, you'd definitely want to do offline maps if you wanted to use Google Maps on their free tier.

[growse]

Worth noting that not every country lets you offline a map. There's a list of countries you can offline a map for here: https://support.google.com/gmm/answer/2650347?hl=en

It's a long list, but there's some notable / surprising absences (e.g. Brazil, Spain).

[borgel]

I used TMO's free international 2G (with a 2013 Moto X) in Japan for two weeks. Maps was not a problem. It was slower then I was used to over 4G, but certainly fast enough to look up transit directions and search for places.

I was very satisfied and would gladly use them again. Having transit directions made spontaneous travel much easier.

[walterbell]

Does the slow connection work for background reception of email? In that case, one would never wait interactively for email, only be notified when email had already been received.

[cthalupa]

I was in South Africa recently, and got a consistent 256kbps using the roaming data on t-mobile. It's not 4G, but it's significantly better than sub 56k.

[xeromal]

Basically, it's enough to whatsapp someone to meet up. I thought it was incredibly valuable during the world cup last year.