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Tip of the Week: Restrict your Data Use When Traveling With a Foreign SIM Card
Hello, readers. I’m back from a vacation in Canada, where I got inspiration for this tip.
In a recent newsletter, I mentioned that one of the best ways to save money when taking your smartphone to a foreign country is to use a foreign SIM card instead of paying your carrier for international roaming. Buying a generous amount of cellular data from a foreign carrier usually costs $20 to $30, whereas paying your domestic carrier for international roaming typically costs upward of $100. (If you need a refresher, read my past guide on traveling with a smartphone.)
Here’s Part 2 of that advice: You will need to watch your data use. Normally when you’re at home, you have lots of applications downloading data in the background over a cellular connection. If you leave those apps alone when using a foreign SIM card, you could quickly burn through all the data you just bought for your trip.
That almost happened to me. I was in Vancouver for only three days and purchased a SIM card with one gigabyte of data for $30 from Bell Canada. I checked my data use after one day and discovered, to my surprise, that I had already used half of the gigabyte (or 500 megabytes). When I looked at my cellular settings I saw that my apps for podcasts, Spotify and Apple News had consumed hundreds of megabytes of data in the background. I then went through my settings and disabled the majority of my apps from using data over a cellular connection.
Here’s how to do that on an iPhone: Open the Settings app and tap Cellular to load a switchboard for apps using cellular data. Toggle off cellular access for all but the ones you need for travel. Similarly on Android, open the Settings app, tap data usage, and then select cellular data usage. From here, select the data-hogging apps and disable background data.
— Brian X. Chen