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Data Usage in Foreign Countries?


toma351

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I'm in the U.S. I have two international trips coming up: Bonaire and England. In the past I've always downloaded to my Garmin and printed out the info, which works if I know ahead of time what area I want to search in, more or less.

 

I love the flexibility of caching with my iPhone and looking for a nearby cache wherever I might be, and Verizon has a plan for $25 for 100MB of data as a "global feature" option. How much is 100MB? If I spend a full day running around looking at maps and caches, about how much data would I use? Can somebody give me an estimate?

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There really is no need to purchase a foreign data plan unless you really really want it - although if your phone is unlocked a local SIM card can be a cheaper option.

 

I just spent a week in a foreign country and have cached in England and Scotland. According to my wife I found way too many caches in these locations.

 

My wife picked up a cheap flip phone on ebay for England so we could call ahead when need arose, but we did not want to buy a foreign plan from our carrier and did not see the need to purchase a local SIM card for data. I saved the caches I wanted to look for to the iphone app I use (Geosphere) before leaving, had offline maps for general information and routing, and used wifi to cache the app's maps or to search for other caches on this site. I like pocket earth for general offline maps, Gaia gps for offline topos, and Navigon for driving - and Geosphere directly interfaces with each of these.

 

With roaming turned off, there never has been a problem. Wifi is commonly available in many locations we have visited - although when we were in Peru it was a little trickier. In England, the hotels or B&B's we stayed at generally had wifi, although it was very slow in some of the outlying isles. I assume you could load a full pocket query for bonaire into your phone just before your trip. But regardless, my cellular data use has been zero, even when we have wanted to stream dart tournaments.

 

I generally identify the caches I want to seek before leaving since I want to make sure they will interest me - but we ended up taking a half day trip to visit an unplanned location - I did a quick wifi search, finding a cache I wanted to do when we were there. Geosphere makes it very easy to search and save caches for offline use, combine and filter pocket queries, maintain lists for each location, or export caches to my gpsr - I loaded caches and OSM maps on the handheld but did not end up not using it. It was too easy with the iphone.

 

As an added note, however, don't forget that the phone's gpsr will not work in airplane mode so be sure to turn that off if you had it on during a flight - keeping cellular data and/or roaming off will not affect it, however. I forgot to switch from airplane mode when we landed in Glasgow and did not notice it until I went to find a cache. I might have still been waiting for my iphone 5 to find satellites if I had not looked at the settings.

Edited by geodarts
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I'm in the U.S. I have two international trips coming up: Bonaire and England. In the past I've always downloaded to my Garmin and printed out the info, which works if I know ahead of time what area I want to search in, more or less.

 

I love the flexibility of caching with my iPhone and looking for a nearby cache wherever I might be, and Verizon has a plan for $25 for 100MB of data as a "global feature" option. How much is 100MB? If I spend a full day running around looking at maps and caches, about how much data would I use? Can somebody give me an estimate?

 

If you're download maps on the fly that will chew up your data.

 

If you can plan even a little way ahead of time you can probably do what you need with wifi. In English towns you won't have to go far before you find a McDonalds/Starbucks/other-generic-mediocre-food-and-drink-outlet with free wifi, or a bar with free wifi for customers, or whatever.

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