This post is a “guest” posting by Mr. Snacks, at the request of Mrs. Snacks.
Telecommunications while abroad has always been a bit of a pain point for us. Travelling abroad usually meant putting our phones on airplane mode when we got on the plane and leaving cellular service turned off for the duration of the trip. Yes, we could have paid the roaming charges, but they can get ridiculous when you travel as much as we do (or did) and it was usually only a minor inconvenience and a nice way to not be tempted to respond to work emails while on vacation. On the occasions where it rose to the level of being a major inconvenience, we’d turn on cellular on one of our phones, pay the ridiculous US carrier daily roaming fees, and then turn it off as soon as humanly possible.
On longer trips and assuming your phone is unlocked (which ours are), we could buy a local SIM card, but by swapping the SIM in your phone, you lose access to your US phone number over Wi-Fi Calling. That’s fine for a week or two trip, but when you are travelling for months it means either constantly swapping SIM cards in the device to see if you have messages from home, or risk missing voicemails like “Hey, I noticed water coming out the front door of your house – maybe you should have someone look into that?” or “Hi, this is Elon Musk, I’ve heard you are really great and would like to offer you a ton of money to work a hour a week, but I need to hear from you today”. I’ll decline to comment on which of those calls is more likely.
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