{"id":22339,"date":"2016-06-25T15:35:39","date_gmt":"2016-06-25T14:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/?p=22339"},"modified":"2018-12-04T17:53:16","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T17:53:16","slug":"6-tips-for-roaming-european-internet-access-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ourtour.co.uk\/home\/6-tips-for-roaming-european-internet-access-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"6 Tips for Roaming European Internet Access 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The SIMs we’ve used so far in 2016<\/p><\/div>\n

Fancy roaming about Europe in a motorhome or camper van, footloose and fancy free? Don’t blame you, it’s a pretty cool continent to amble about.<\/p>\n

All in, we’ve had the good fortune to spend 30 months doing just that, including a couple of forays to North Africa. We’ve updated this blog from everywhere we’ve gone to. That’s about 30 countries, and over 600 places<\/a> (so far), so we’ve built up a bit of knowledge on how to obtain and use SIM cards and WiFi abroad.<\/p>\n

Here’s are 6 tips to keep you connected, hopefully save you some trouble and pop some hard-earned back into your pocket!<\/p>\n

Tip 1: Suss Out Your Internet Strategy<\/h2>\n

If you’re planning on visiting France, staying on campsites and just using email to stay in touch with friends and family back home, you’ll likely want a different Internet solution to someone running a time-critical business from the road, roaming from country to country each week. Here are a few example strategies, depending on how much you want to spend, the speed of the Internet connection you need and when\/where you need it:<\/p>\n

Strategy 1: Low Cost, Low Convenience:<\/strong> If you’re not bothered about being able to connect all the time from the comfort of your van, and want to keep costs to a minimum, just look for WiFi on campsites, Tourist Info offices, caf\u00e9s, in town centres and the like. You might need to sit in reception, or park your van close to wherever an access point has been mounted, in order to get a decent connection. Also be aware that campsite WiFi can be costly, slow or simply fail completely: we once had to argue to get our money back after the site WiFi in Rome failed for three days.<\/p>\n

Strategy 2: Low Cost, Medium Convenience:<\/strong> If you want to be able to sit in your van and use the Internet, but aren’t much bothered about being able to access it every day, and want to keep connection costs down, then WiFi is a good option, but consider buying a signal booster. These work. We have a uni-directional one which can pick up signals from huge distances but is less convenient than an omni-directional one, which generally have a shorter range. With a uni-directional antenna you have to point it in the direction of the network, which isn’t always easy if you don’t know where it is. Check out motorhomewifi.com<\/a> for WiFi boosters. Be aware that these boosters only help you get a good connection to a WiFi network; if the connection from the campsite out to the Internet is slow or overloaded, then you’ll still have a poor experience.<\/p>\n

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A uni-directional WiFi signal booster from motorhomewifi.com. We met one couple who’d mounted such an antenna on the back of their TV satellite dish, so it could be lifted up and rotated from inside the van.<\/p><\/div>\n

Strategy 3: Medium Cost, Medium to High Convenience:<\/strong> If you want to be able to connect from your van all the time, but don’t want to install a \u00a33000+ satellite Internet system, then cellular (3G or 4G) is probably for you. The days of slow (GPRS or EDGE) connections are over, 3G and 4G mobile networks are nigh-on everywhere. Ignore any satellite marketing material which claims otherwise.<\/p>\n

We used to use a USB dongle connected to a laptop, but in order to use the Internet connection on other devices (phone, ipad) the laptop had to be running, and some software like Connectify <\/a>installed and running to share the network out – not very convenient. We now use a MiFi-type device<\/a> (cost: about \u00a390 for a 4G one) to share out the connection, the SIM card fits straight into the MiFi and broadcasts the internet connection into our van, like a mini WiFi network. Our MiFi is connected to our 12v system for power and also to a roof-mounted 4G antenna<\/a> (cost: about \u00a3150) which we fitted ourselves, to maximise our chances of having a connection. Having used the antenna for 6 months we can confirm it works very well, although I suspect even it might struggle in Ksar Ghilane<\/a>!<\/p>\n

The SIM card needed to connect to the cellular network requires a subscription. The cost of this varies massively by provider, country and deals available at the time. As a very (very!) rough rule of thumb, if you budget for about \u00a3250 a year for 5GB per month of data you should have cash left at the end of the year after wandering umpteen European countries, especially if you use local SIMs (see below).<\/p>\n

In terms of speed, 3G speeds (minimum 1Mbps or more download, 0.5Mbps upload) are typical in most countries now, even outside towns and cities. This makes most services (except decent streaming video perhaps) available to us consistently. 4G is becoming more and more available, which will usually support good video streaming. Skype recommend<\/a> about 0.5Mbps download and upload, for high quality video calls, jumping to 1.5Mbps (down and up) for HD video.<\/p>\n

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I’ve just done a speed test on our 4G connection here in Finland (we’re by a beach, about 2km from the nearest town). 13Mbps down and 5.7Mbs up, so we can easily use Skype video calls or similar streaming services<\/p><\/div>\n

Strategy 4: High Cost, High Convenience:<\/strong> Finally, if you want a solution which will connect just about everywhere, without worrying about crossing borders or how much data you’re using, get a roof-mounted auto-seeking unlimited data satellite Internet system. It’ll cost you \u00a33000ish, plus \u00a3350ish a year subscription for such a system. You can get kits which combine TV and Internet. Cheaper ones (\u00a31000ish) are available (like this<\/a>) which might work well if you plan to stay on campsites and not move about much, since it’s a dish on a tripod. I’ve never used satellite Internet, so can only guess how good it is, but line of sight (not parking under trees, or by buildings), the current draw from leisure batteries, the latency involved (only important for real-time stuff like video calls) and the satellite footprint would probably feature in my thinking if I were to go down this route.<\/p>\n

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Roof-mounted motorhome satellite internet system – photo from motorhomewifi.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Tip 2: Mix Up WiFi and Cellular<\/h2>\n

Unless you’re a very casual user of the Internet, you’re likely to get best value from a combination of cellular and WiFi. We’ve got a WiFi booster to enable us to pick up distant or weak WiFi networks (we have a fore-runner to this kit<\/a>). We only tend to use it when we know there is WiFi available to us, such as when we’re on a campsite, or when we have no cellular access (typically when we’ve just crossed a border) and are willing to play hunt-the-WiFi. Unlocked WiFi is a fairly rare animal these days in most countries by the way. Having both methods available to us increases our flexibility, and means we can use streaming services like Skype more often (see below).<\/p>\n

Tip 3: Get a Fall-Back Solution, a UK SIM<\/h2>\n

Our fall-back solution, which we can use if all else fails, is a pay-as-you-go roaming UK SIM. At the time of writing (June 2016) Three UK’s Feel at Home<\/a> is about the most cost effective and convenient solution (we got our SIM from motorhomewifi.com, but you can also get them here from Amazon UK<\/a>). It lets us access the Internet in numerous European countries (plus more further afield – full list here<\/a>) without paying bonkers-high roaming charges, and it ‘just works’ as you go from country to country.<\/p>\n

The downside? It’s normally not as cheap as local SIMs and you can only use each SIM for a limited length of time in ‘Feel at Home’ countries. You can’t just have one SIM and use it for months on end (check the latest terms and conditions<\/a> – at the time of writing each SIM could only roam for 3 out of every 12 months). How much Three police this, we don’t know, so we’ve got a few Feel at Home SIMs that are Pay as You Go, not on a contract which means we get less data per month but enables us to rotate SIMs so we don’t fall foul of the 3 month rule. Also, Three’s SIM won’t work on the latest 4G networks abroad, only 3G or slower – although 3G’s fast enough for us almost all of the time.<\/p>\n

We typically only use the Three SIM in Feel at Home countries, adding credit to it and using that to buy an ‘add-on’ which gives us a fixed amount of data to use over 30 days. However, the Three SIM will also work in non Feel at Home countries like Germany by roaming. This is far too expensive to use normally (about \u00a344 per GB<\/a>), but in an emergency will get us online.e<\/p>\n

A few other things to note:<\/p>\n