T-Mobile International Plan Coverage
 

The wife and I are planning a 3 week trip to Japan and considering adding a T-Mobile international plan.

It’s $50 for a 30 day pass. Unlimited calls and 15 gigs of “high speed data”. (sounds like marketing ). I don’t expect to make any calls while in Japan, except in an emergency or to call a hotel. Maybe a few texts back to the U.S. for friends. It’s mostly for navigating around the cities using Google maps. We have IPhone SE gen3.

Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto-Hiroshima and day trips from those cities. We will have all hotel reservations & Shinkansen booked prior to leaving the U.S.

We’re really excited but honestly it’s approaching Sim/Esim/wifi overload. Maybe I’m making it a bigger deal than what it is. I’m a senior senior citizen and it’s confusing. I just want to walk off the plane, turn the phone on and presto it works and I’m navigating from A to B. Simplicity is what I’m looking for.

Any suggestions?

Then pay the $50.

Does your current plan already offer intl roaming? Very old plans may offer unlimited 2G speed +text, newer plans may offer 5GB full speed +text.


If you're using iPhone, it's very simple to install esim and get it working before your trip (ubigi comes to mind), $17/10GB 30days but no calls/text (but if your TMobile plan inclufes texts and you pay $0.25/min call via tmobile, thsts fine). There's a mechanism to have free calls (wifi calling but via the esim data instead of wifi) which should work, but I'm ignoring that right now to keep things simple

You want to spend $50 or $17, your choice

We just used what was included in our TMobile plan for free for our January trip and had no issues with navigation (of course we used wifi while at hotels).

Agreed. My T-mobile allows free data in international countries. I have been able to use google maps, call a rideshare vehicle, and make calls/messaging via Whatsapp etc.

When I want to make and receive calls over wifi for free, I put my phone on airplane mode and ensure that I am connected to wifi wherever I am.

I really don't think OP needs to pay $50 extra a month for the international plan, but if your plan does not include the free data abroad, then perhaps that is a consideration.

Thanks for all the help everyone. Unfortunately we don’t have the free international data plan. We’re on the Essentials 55+ plan which is free texts and .25 p/min calls international. I was mainly worried about using up the 15 gigs ( 21 day trip), mainly using Google maps for getting around.

I’d definitely use more than 15 gigs in 21 days but I’m a heavy phone user, never use public wifi. Best thing to do, though is monitor what you usually use.

If you are on iPhone go to settings -> mobile and scroll down and you can see data used in the current ‘period’. If you scroll all the way to the bottom you’ll see when the period was last reset, which is probably when you bought your phone. divide usage by number of days since the reset and you have your daily rate. Or even easier, hit the reset button and wait a week.

note that this is also the screen where you can turn off mobile data for apps. So if you don’t want apps to chew up data in the background this is where you can turn it off. A good one to turn off whilst travelling is photos; as syncing to the cloud can really chew through the gigs.

I run at about 1.3gigs a day but will do much more when travelling as I will tether my laptop for work and won’t have my home or office wifi.

I never use insecure public wifi.

Or if there is only two of you, maybe a pocket WiFi, more expensive but unlimited data and free WiFi calling anywhere 24/7 on multiple devices.

I run a little over 1GB/day, but I know I'm a heavy user. 15GB over 21day should be fine

​​​​​​You can mitigate some of this by downloading Google maps o

https://support.google.com/maps/answ...rm%3DiOSffline