In 2015 I went to Japan to visit Brother #4 and his family. We (Brother #3 and my two teenage sons) traveled together, and I added the AT&T International package to my sons’ and my phones. The AT&T plan provides cheaper calling, unlimited text and a whopping 800 MB of data for a mere $120 (remember when a megabyte of data was huge?). Needless to say, my kids burned through 800 MB in 2 days. So I had to institute the “no streaming YouTube” rule. By the end of the week they seemed to get it and the “you’ve purchased another 1 MB of data” texts slowed down.
This year we repeated the trip and I decided to be smart. But not like the kind of smart where you actually know what you’re doing, the kind of smart where you come up with a half-baked idea and Google around enough to convince yourself it’s a great idea.
On the inter-tubes, people were explaining how you can’t really get a cellphone in Japan, there are rentals, but if you’re travelling there you’ll have a tough time finding a cellphone store that will cater to foreigners. I remembered there were vending machines at the airport selling SIM cards. So I went onto eBay and found some NTT DOCOMO SIMs, unlimited data for 7 days, a mere $16 USD. Sounds like a deal, bought myself three.
Of course this means no phone number, but I had another plan, and this part turned out pretty good. In Japan and many parts of Asia, Line is the messaging app. You can send text, voice messages, make phone calls, video calls and set up group chats. They also have stickers, like emoji on steroids, little GIFs that can include animation and sound, many free, some you buy. You can also send stickers as gifts to other people. Brother #3 and his family in Japan were already using Line. So I got my kids, Brother #4 and wife (she wasn’t going with us but I wouldn’t have a phone #) all onto Line.
My grand scheme was to get the $30 plan so we wouldn’t be phone-less during our transfers in Hong Kong and Taipei. And change SIMs before we landed in Japan and again when we left. Now for three phones I’m investing $108 instead of the $600 last year with the three $120 plans and overages.
So what went wrong? The first problem were device issues. Son #1 has a Fire Phone running Cyanogen, and when we put in the APN settings for the SIM it wouldn’t save the settings or recognize the SIM. Son #2 has a beater iPhone, I borrowed and an old unlocked iPhone and had him transfer everything before the trip. The directions to activate the SIM on the iPhone involved loading a web site which wouldn’t load, SI kept asking for a password, eBay seller never responded and I wasn't going to call NTT DOCOMO to try and sort it out.
My card activated fine, but that’s when I ran into problem #2: poor network coverage. Brother #4 has two phones on different networks (work & personal) and he mentioned that sometimes one will work and the other won’t. And being on a data only plan was even worse.
After a full day of gnashing teeth, we all went back to our AT&T SIMs, which also provide network roaming, so our coverage problem was mostly fixed. By day 3 we ate up our $30 plan data, so I jumped online to chat with a rep, and after 10 minutes, all 3 phones were upgraded to the 800 MB plan.
AT&T also provides a Passport app which helps you find and connect to foreign WiFi networks to save on data. You run the app, find a network and connect, then a login page comes up ad if you scroll down there’s a section for international travelers using a cell partner, but all the partners were Asian or British. To be fair I never bothered to contact AT&T to ask how to get past the login, but the WiFi was generally only in city centers and we were traveling by train and into the countryside most of the time. The Passport app was just a constant irritant and never got a connection. There are also a few apps which promise access to free networks, also never managed to connect even once.
So with most connectivity issues resolved, one other problem became apparent after I got home: Twitter app does not cache posts properly. I was posting to Twitter at least ten times a day, and when there was no network I would see a little alert that Twitter was waiting for a connection, and didn’t think about it. I got home and realized I was missing entire days of tweets, I suspect I had the same issue last year, but wasn't posting much, so didn't notice missing tweets. Another minor annoyance, but one I understand, is Twitter orders the posts as they come in, not when they were sent, which means some of my posts are out of order since some went out right away while others that were in cache from the previous day showed up later.
Line, while not posting to a website, messages always posted to the chat room, I sent many pics while on the train, and eventually everything got through. One downside of Line is it is data dependent, so while I didn't stream or do much surfing without WiFi, I still hit the 800 MB limit after about 4 days.
Lessons learned for next time:
The last phone related technical thingie I learned on my trip.... If you call from Google Hangouts on WiFi, no confusion, but if you call using the data plan on the local carrier you have to dial using the international country code. Which I'm glad it stopped me since I quickly realized it is probably cheaper to use minutes than eat up my data.
This year we repeated the trip and I decided to be smart. But not like the kind of smart where you actually know what you’re doing, the kind of smart where you come up with a half-baked idea and Google around enough to convince yourself it’s a great idea.
On the inter-tubes, people were explaining how you can’t really get a cellphone in Japan, there are rentals, but if you’re travelling there you’ll have a tough time finding a cellphone store that will cater to foreigners. I remembered there were vending machines at the airport selling SIM cards. So I went onto eBay and found some NTT DOCOMO SIMs, unlimited data for 7 days, a mere $16 USD. Sounds like a deal, bought myself three.
Of course this means no phone number, but I had another plan, and this part turned out pretty good. In Japan and many parts of Asia, Line is the messaging app. You can send text, voice messages, make phone calls, video calls and set up group chats. They also have stickers, like emoji on steroids, little GIFs that can include animation and sound, many free, some you buy. You can also send stickers as gifts to other people. Brother #3 and his family in Japan were already using Line. So I got my kids, Brother #4 and wife (she wasn’t going with us but I wouldn’t have a phone #) all onto Line.
My grand scheme was to get the $30 plan so we wouldn’t be phone-less during our transfers in Hong Kong and Taipei. And change SIMs before we landed in Japan and again when we left. Now for three phones I’m investing $108 instead of the $600 last year with the three $120 plans and overages.
So what went wrong? The first problem were device issues. Son #1 has a Fire Phone running Cyanogen, and when we put in the APN settings for the SIM it wouldn’t save the settings or recognize the SIM. Son #2 has a beater iPhone, I borrowed and an old unlocked iPhone and had him transfer everything before the trip. The directions to activate the SIM on the iPhone involved loading a web site which wouldn’t load, SI kept asking for a password, eBay seller never responded and I wasn't going to call NTT DOCOMO to try and sort it out.
My card activated fine, but that’s when I ran into problem #2: poor network coverage. Brother #4 has two phones on different networks (work & personal) and he mentioned that sometimes one will work and the other won’t. And being on a data only plan was even worse.
After a full day of gnashing teeth, we all went back to our AT&T SIMs, which also provide network roaming, so our coverage problem was mostly fixed. By day 3 we ate up our $30 plan data, so I jumped online to chat with a rep, and after 10 minutes, all 3 phones were upgraded to the 800 MB plan.
AT&T also provides a Passport app which helps you find and connect to foreign WiFi networks to save on data. You run the app, find a network and connect, then a login page comes up ad if you scroll down there’s a section for international travelers using a cell partner, but all the partners were Asian or British. To be fair I never bothered to contact AT&T to ask how to get past the login, but the WiFi was generally only in city centers and we were traveling by train and into the countryside most of the time. The Passport app was just a constant irritant and never got a connection. There are also a few apps which promise access to free networks, also never managed to connect even once.
So with most connectivity issues resolved, one other problem became apparent after I got home: Twitter app does not cache posts properly. I was posting to Twitter at least ten times a day, and when there was no network I would see a little alert that Twitter was waiting for a connection, and didn’t think about it. I got home and realized I was missing entire days of tweets, I suspect I had the same issue last year, but wasn't posting much, so didn't notice missing tweets. Another minor annoyance, but one I understand, is Twitter orders the posts as they come in, not when they were sent, which means some of my posts are out of order since some went out right away while others that were in cache from the previous day showed up later.
Line, while not posting to a website, messages always posted to the chat room, I sent many pics while on the train, and eventually everything got through. One downside of Line is it is data dependent, so while I didn't stream or do much surfing without WiFi, I still hit the 800 MB limit after about 4 days.
Lessons learned for next time:
- Just eat the cost and go with the international plan
- Caveat: Maybe there’s a data SIM plan with roaming across carriers? Doubt it, but worth a look
- Remind the kids to not stream media
- Caveat: They cooperated this year so overages weren't be too bad
- Don’t Twitter without a data network, preferably WiFi
The last phone related technical thingie I learned on my trip.... If you call from Google Hangouts on WiFi, no confusion, but if you call using the data plan on the local carrier you have to dial using the international country code. Which I'm glad it stopped me since I quickly realized it is probably cheaper to use minutes than eat up my data.