Originally Posted by
JPDM
I don't find this expensive. for one thing it is cheaper than what I pay in Canada.
In any case, read my post. I said that this is for tourists going to China. Your links are nice but useless for someone going to China and not going to HK first.
I never have any issues with my VPN. I drive around using Google Maps and never have any problem. It has worked for me in Beijing, Shanghai and in remote areas (countryside in Gansu). No drop in connection requiring me to sign on my VPN again as you have described.
I didn't set foot in HK on my last trip. China Unicom HK will ship those SIM cards to international destinations, and they can also be bought on Amazon and from here
https://www.comnet-telecom.us/store/sim-cards.html if you are coming from the US (this is the link where I purchased the card, and it came with a nice $5 discount and free shipping too!).
Originally Posted by
moondog
The big downside to the Sims offered in jpdm's link is the 90 day expiration; these Sims are actually fairly easy to buy for around y80 locally, but I would definitely pay double for a non-tourist Sim, even if doing so entailed a visit to a Unicom store. Unicom allows you to place Sims on "vacation mode" when you aren't in China.
I agree with jpdm that dropped VPN connections are basically a non-iissue for me.
My VPNs all automatically reconnect, but they take about 5-10 seconds to do so. Try to use Google Maps or anything else while it's reconnecting and you get no service, which basically adds 5-10 seconds to every data dropout. As frequently as this was happening to me along the 4th ring road, it become an additional annoyance. Sometimes, I had to actually go into the VPN app to reset it by hitting DISCONNECT and the CONNECT again, because it got stuck in the CONNECTING state and wouldn't come out. I am not sure why, but this was also extremely annoying. The more times it has to reconnect, the higher the probability this would happen. I had this happen with multiple VPN apps.