I’m heading to the States shortly — then Barcelona — and I’m therefore strongly considering trying out Truphone’s Local Anywhere package. I’ve a strong affinity to simply walking into a T-Mobile USA shop and picking up some sim cards, but I do think I should check out the service and see what it’s like.
I’ve long been a believer that whilst the Truphone wifi concept was cool and smart, the reality is that I travel quite a lot and am not necessarily always near a useful wifi hotspot.
Truphone-on-a-sim-card makes a lot of sense to me.
Their data rates aren’t too bad either: If you’re in the States and you’ve upgraded to ‘US Local Rates’ ($13/month) data is £0.75 per mb. As apposed to something crazy — Vodafone will charge me up to £15 for 25MB in a given day — that sounds good until you add it up over 7 days (£105 pounds!).
If you assume I would use a minimum of 5mb per day just checking email and so on, Truphone would charge me £26.25 for that. Actually, let’s compare like for like… (although I don’t know if I’d actually *use* 25mb per day)…
25mb x £0.75/mb = £18.75 x 7 days = £131.25.
So Truphone would actually end up more expensive in that regard.
Local sim or Truphone? I’m going to have a think!
