You arrive in Dubai, your phone connects immediately, you launch a WhatsApp call home to say you’ve arrived… and nothing. The screen spins in va...
SIM card or eSIM for Egypt? We compare the French plan (outside the zone, watch out for the trap), local operators Vodafone Egypt, Orange, and e&, and...
SIM card or eSIM for Thailand? We compare the French plan (Free includes Thailand, not the others), local operators AIS, TrueMove H, and dtac, and the...
Working, navigating, and calling home all hinge on one thing when you travel full time, and that is a signal you can actually rely on. Because we both work partly from the van, connectivity stopped being a nice extra and became infrastructure, so this section gathers everything we have learned keeping a household online across borders. The best starting point is our overview of internet and vanlife, which lays out the whole approach before you drown in operator names.
Roaming rules and data caps change the moment you cross a frontier, so understanding the system pays off fast. Our guide to mobile internet abroad explains how packages and roaming actually behave once you leave home, and it pairs neatly with our habits for managing data consumption abroad so a single video call does not eat your whole allowance. For deep countryside and long stints off any tower, we also broke down Starlink for a motorhome or van, weight, power draw, and whether it earns its keep.
Most connectivity headaches are solved by the right local plan, so we test them destination by destination. Around our own patch we cover the Portugal SIM options for visitors and residents, the unlimited SIM for Spain, and, for the trip that taught us about weak Highland reception, the best UK SIM for a Scotland road trip. Heading southeast, our Greece SIM plan guide sorts out island hopping, while Turkey hides a nasty catch we flag in the Turkey SIM and the IMEI trap, a piece that can save you a very expensive surprise.
Our travels wander well past the Schengen zone, and connectivity gets stranger the further you go. Across North Africa we sorted a Morocco SIM card and an Egypt SIM and eSIM, and for the long haul destinations we cover the Vietnam SIM card, the Japan SIM card, the Thailand SIM and eSIM, and even a Mexico SIM card for readers taking the lifestyle transatlantic. Each one is written the same way we plan our own arrivals, so you land already knowing which shop to walk into.