BigFlyer

My first time using the international roaming - and I was pleasantly surprised at how much worked, even at the slow speeds. In no particular order:

• The least functional thing was the web browser. Even when loading mobile optimized pages it was annoyingly slow. This was the biggest surprise.
• Maps worked great - a little slow to load the first time, but not that slow, and once it cached the local maps it was close to perfect;
• Uber worked fine, just like home, no noticeable delay
• The New York Times app was great - it downloads the whole site, which can take a while, but once it is downloaded it is all there
• The biggest surprise was how well the Whatsapp Voip worked. The connection from both ZA and NL to the US was great, no gaps, no distortion. I was surprised that it also worked well with my wife who was travelling with me, we could talk to each other on a good connection even though the Tmobile VPN meant it was bounding back and forth to the US a few times. This is great if you are travelling with someone, you avoid those 40 cent per minute calls (20 cents per minute for each phone on the call.)
• As I suspected, if you just do a speed test using the closest server you get inaccurate numbers because of the VPN - the signal is bouncing back and forth to the US. So, when I ran the Ookla speedtest using the default POP in the Netherlands, I got a ping of 300 ms with a download speed of .03 Mbps and upload speed of .07 Mbps. Forcing the app to use a POP in the Chicago area, the ping was 156 ms, with an upload of .12 Mbps and a download speed of .09 Mbps.
• The Netherlands connection was LTE - in ZA it was HSPA or HSPA +, and I believe that the ping times were larger in ZA but I did not make a note of it.
• I am accustomed to buying local SIMs - and it would have been easy to pick one up in ZA. But the free data worked fine for most things, so I didn't bother with the local SIM.
• I used the built-in Google Voice VOIP to call the US - I listened to and left a Voicemail which sounded fine, but I did not speak to anyone.
• Uploading photos to Instagram or Whatsapp was much faster than I expected - I didn't time it, but I would say about 30 seconds, certainly less than a minute. I assume Facebook would have similar timing.