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- Sep 13, 2014
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My first "contribution" post, so be gentle with me. 
We recently returned from three weeks in the USA. We kitted out our family of five with the Simcorner unlimited talk/text/data sims when they were on special through Ozb: we purchased though their website. We also used our phones as mobile hot spots for laptops and iPads (no longer possible unfortunately).
I have to say I was very impressed with Simcorner's service: we had to clear up one cc issue with them on the phone and they were very helpful. In the last weeks before we departed, one of my children bought an HTC M8, another a Nexus 6 (which arrived from France just a couple of days before departure). Simcorner swapped two microsims for nanosims at no charge and a turnaround time of 48 hours.
T-mobile assign a phone number to your sim only at activation. As we were going for less than 30 days, we had Simcorner activate our sims three days before departure: they were then able to email us our US phone numbers. We were able to give friends, staff, US hotels and other travel bookings our US numbers before departure as well as program each other's phones with our US numbers (important). We swapped out our AU sims whilst in the air on QF93, landing in LAX with phones and data working perfectly. We stored our AU sims in labelled ziplock bags (and remembered to pack a pointy thing to pop open the sim drawer on the mobile phones). The use of SD card cases to store sims has also been mentioned elsewhere.
We found t-mobile to be completely satisfactory for our purposes. Here in Aus we are all on "grandfathered" Exetel $15/mth 3G mobile plans, so we didn't feel any speed differences, our data being mostly H+ with occasionally appearance of 3G and rarely E. All our phones (Motorola Razr M, HTC M8, Samsung Galaxy S5 (2x), Google Nexus 6) performed very well. In CA, we had constant H+ all over SFO and on freeways I-80, 680, 580, 280, 101 between SFO and Sacramento out to Stockton and down to Monterey. Son used his Nexus6 for Google SatNav and turn by turn navigation and it never faltered once.
Yes, there is free wifi everywhere – In And Out Burgers (apparently an AFF favourite), Bourdoins, McDonald's, Macy's, for example. Our hotel, Tuscan at Fishermans Wharf (highly recommended BTW) offered free wifi which was excellent at all times of day and night EXCEPT between 6-9pm: this follows a pattern I've found even here in AU. Wifi can be variable in speed with often page loads of a minute or more on iPad Air 2s and Nexus 6 (our two most recently released pieces of hardware).
In Florida, we spent our time in Orlando. I attended a convention and there was excellent wifi at the two conference hotels and in the convention centres. Outside the hotels, phone and data was always constantly available. My family had 10-day park hopper passes for the Disney parks; we also spent a day at Universal Studios. Apps such as My Disney Experience, WDW and Universal Studios Wait lines were invaluable for changing our plans "on the go". Both parks had wifi which often dropped out (on all phones), so reverting to 3G was often necessary. Inside rides such as Space Mountain, 7 Dwarves' Mine Train, both HPotter rides, we lost both data and wifi.
Text is generally much more useful inside parks than phone as you can't take a call whilst looping the loop on Incredible Hulk. The Parks are generally very noisy and texts replace the "What, say that again" shouting whilst bent over double to try to block out ambient noise. We were able to liaise with each other as we all had different rides we wanted to do (or not do!). At night, we all set up our various ipads and laptops to hotspot to our phones. Our convention hotel in Orlando (Caribe Royale) offered wifi only for first 2 days, then would have charged for the remainder of our stay (probably because they knew their hotel was full of convention attendees and would pay the $15 per day fee). In addition, free wifi was limited to two logons per room/apartment so the use of mobile data was always necessary for our family of five. OTOH, Contemporary Resort at Magic Kingdom had unlimited (per-room) free wifi.
We parents used net to book rental cars on-the-hop, confirming other reservations, logging into work etc. Sons used facebook and youtube and reported no difficulties, no-one appeared to run out of their 5GB hotspot limit (the Simcorner plan we had was the unlimited-all plan but with a 5GB cap on "fast" hotspot data; fast data unlimited on the phone itself). No-one reported stuttering or buffering whilst online.
We had no difficulties in activation and no time was wasted looking for AT&T or Walmart or t-mobile shops whilst in the US: I have done this in trhe past: never again. It can take half a day out of your holidays to find a store, fill out paperwork for sims, activate sims, program everyone's phones with each other numbers: it's far more efficient to have done all that before you leave AUS.
Is 4G necessary? I don't believe so for most requirements. You're not going to download Photoshop CC or Linux distros whilst away are you?
However, the loss of tethering is a major blow as it really limits the versatility and ability to use one's tablet or laptop whilst on-the-go. Whether t-mobile can enforce this is unknown. I do remember that when we were in UnZud last year Telecom NZ's data plan permitted tethering, but only two devices. We had a data sim in my iPad Air and could never log on more than two smartphones/laptops at a time. Discussion elsewhere suggests that blocking tethering is an Apple-only "enhancement".
We recently returned from three weeks in the USA. We kitted out our family of five with the Simcorner unlimited talk/text/data sims when they were on special through Ozb: we purchased though their website. We also used our phones as mobile hot spots for laptops and iPads (no longer possible unfortunately).
I have to say I was very impressed with Simcorner's service: we had to clear up one cc issue with them on the phone and they were very helpful. In the last weeks before we departed, one of my children bought an HTC M8, another a Nexus 6 (which arrived from France just a couple of days before departure). Simcorner swapped two microsims for nanosims at no charge and a turnaround time of 48 hours.
T-mobile assign a phone number to your sim only at activation. As we were going for less than 30 days, we had Simcorner activate our sims three days before departure: they were then able to email us our US phone numbers. We were able to give friends, staff, US hotels and other travel bookings our US numbers before departure as well as program each other's phones with our US numbers (important). We swapped out our AU sims whilst in the air on QF93, landing in LAX with phones and data working perfectly. We stored our AU sims in labelled ziplock bags (and remembered to pack a pointy thing to pop open the sim drawer on the mobile phones). The use of SD card cases to store sims has also been mentioned elsewhere.
We found t-mobile to be completely satisfactory for our purposes. Here in Aus we are all on "grandfathered" Exetel $15/mth 3G mobile plans, so we didn't feel any speed differences, our data being mostly H+ with occasionally appearance of 3G and rarely E. All our phones (Motorola Razr M, HTC M8, Samsung Galaxy S5 (2x), Google Nexus 6) performed very well. In CA, we had constant H+ all over SFO and on freeways I-80, 680, 580, 280, 101 between SFO and Sacramento out to Stockton and down to Monterey. Son used his Nexus6 for Google SatNav and turn by turn navigation and it never faltered once.
Yes, there is free wifi everywhere – In And Out Burgers (apparently an AFF favourite), Bourdoins, McDonald's, Macy's, for example. Our hotel, Tuscan at Fishermans Wharf (highly recommended BTW) offered free wifi which was excellent at all times of day and night EXCEPT between 6-9pm: this follows a pattern I've found even here in AU. Wifi can be variable in speed with often page loads of a minute or more on iPad Air 2s and Nexus 6 (our two most recently released pieces of hardware).
In Florida, we spent our time in Orlando. I attended a convention and there was excellent wifi at the two conference hotels and in the convention centres. Outside the hotels, phone and data was always constantly available. My family had 10-day park hopper passes for the Disney parks; we also spent a day at Universal Studios. Apps such as My Disney Experience, WDW and Universal Studios Wait lines were invaluable for changing our plans "on the go". Both parks had wifi which often dropped out (on all phones), so reverting to 3G was often necessary. Inside rides such as Space Mountain, 7 Dwarves' Mine Train, both HPotter rides, we lost both data and wifi.
Text is generally much more useful inside parks than phone as you can't take a call whilst looping the loop on Incredible Hulk. The Parks are generally very noisy and texts replace the "What, say that again" shouting whilst bent over double to try to block out ambient noise. We were able to liaise with each other as we all had different rides we wanted to do (or not do!). At night, we all set up our various ipads and laptops to hotspot to our phones. Our convention hotel in Orlando (Caribe Royale) offered wifi only for first 2 days, then would have charged for the remainder of our stay (probably because they knew their hotel was full of convention attendees and would pay the $15 per day fee). In addition, free wifi was limited to two logons per room/apartment so the use of mobile data was always necessary for our family of five. OTOH, Contemporary Resort at Magic Kingdom had unlimited (per-room) free wifi.
We parents used net to book rental cars on-the-hop, confirming other reservations, logging into work etc. Sons used facebook and youtube and reported no difficulties, no-one appeared to run out of their 5GB hotspot limit (the Simcorner plan we had was the unlimited-all plan but with a 5GB cap on "fast" hotspot data; fast data unlimited on the phone itself). No-one reported stuttering or buffering whilst online.
We had no difficulties in activation and no time was wasted looking for AT&T or Walmart or t-mobile shops whilst in the US: I have done this in trhe past: never again. It can take half a day out of your holidays to find a store, fill out paperwork for sims, activate sims, program everyone's phones with each other numbers: it's far more efficient to have done all that before you leave AUS.
Is 4G necessary? I don't believe so for most requirements. You're not going to download Photoshop CC or Linux distros whilst away are you?
However, the loss of tethering is a major blow as it really limits the versatility and ability to use one's tablet or laptop whilst on-the-go. Whether t-mobile can enforce this is unknown. I do remember that when we were in UnZud last year Telecom NZ's data plan permitted tethering, but only two devices. We had a data sim in my iPad Air and could never log on more than two smartphones/laptops at a time. Discussion elsewhere suggests that blocking tethering is an Apple-only "enhancement".
