Using Your Phone Abroad 101

Save money, save time.

Full-time travelers must learn how to use their phone abroad in an efficient and affordable way in order to make sure their experiences thrive. By the time you finish this article, you’ll know exactly how to set up your phone for full-time travel.

How many nomads does it take to figure out how to get a cell phone to work internationally?

Learning how to use your phone internationally requires you to understand two concepts. If you understand these two concepts well, the major phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Mint, and others might get a little upset.

Let them.

Understand How Your Phone Works

We’ll start with the two concepts:

1. Your phone has two “sides”:

   a. The phone call/text message/2FA/phone number side and

   b. the data/internet side.

2. The internet on your phone works in two ways:

   a. via WiFi and

   b. via Data

Let’s start with number one, the two sides of your phone. (BTW, the big phone companies don’t tell you this. They just tell you that you get free phone calls and text messages and you have to pay for your data in minutes or unlimited plans. Ignore them.)

The Two Sides of Your Phone

The first side of your phone is the phone number side. I’m going to assume you live in the USA and you have an American phone number. You probably love this phone number, and you’ve had it a long time. With this phone number, you make phone calls, you send text messages, and you receive the 2FA (two-factor authentification texts) from your bank and credit cards to verify you are you.

The other side of your phone is the data/internet side. You could completely use your phone as a phone and never use your data/internet side as long as you never want to use Google GPS, Facebook, email, or most other apps.

The Two Ways Your Phone Uses Internet

This brings us to the internet and its apps on your phone. Your phone accesses the internet in two ways: 1) via WiFI and 2) via data. If you have WiFi in your home or at, say, Starbucks, you can use the internet on your phone and never have to pay for for internet access directly.

But if you don’t have WiFi available, like when you’re driving in your car or you’re out taking a walk, you are using data when you access the internet. Depending on who provides your phone number, you may be using cell towers, WiFi or cell data to make a call (I’ll get to this in a minute.)

You Need Two Products to Make Your Phone Work Internationally

Now that you understand the two sides of your phone and the two ways to use the internet, it’s time to find the products you need to make your phone work internationally.

You could pay your Big Phone Company lots and lots of money to let you use your phone internationally. If that’s your choice, you can stop reading this article.

The following solution works for people with American phone numbers who are in the USA when they set up their phones. Your phones are also unlocked (you are not on a payment plan for your device.)

The Phone Number Product

The first product you need is the one that manages your phone number. You must have a “phone company” maintain your phone number. We recommend Tello. They have a no-data phone plan that is $5 a month. You can port your phone over to Tello. It’s a real phone number, not a voice-over IP phone number like Google Voice, which is free. When you make a phone call with Tello, you use cell data or WiFi. But you don’t use data from your data plan.

Step one: port your phone number to Tello, buy the $5 a month plan. Your phone number is parked, and it will receive phone calls, text messages and 2FA verifications. (Don’t be distracted by the data plans that Tello provides. They’re great for the US but they don’t work internationally.)

By the way, when you travel internationally, it’s important to understand what a “long distance” call is. If you’re in France and you call the USA from your American phone number, that’s a local call. But if you’re in France and you call the barber down the street in France, that’s an international call. Phone companies might charge you pennies on the dollar to make “long distance” calls. Like $.01-03 a minute. “Local” calls are free. 1-800 toll free calls are free.

The Data Plan Product

The second product you need is a data plan. Just like when your Big Phone Company sells you a data plan, you need one for international travel as well. But here’s the thing. Your phone can use any data plan. You just need to install an e-sim to use it.

Step two: Get an e-sim and a data plan. What’s an e-sim? A sim card is a small piece of hardware in your phone that runs your data plan. Most phones have done away with physical sim cards and now you can use e-sims. Thus the hardware has turned into software. You download the software to your phone and then you pay for a data plan that suits your needs. You can buy the plans by the country, region, continent, sea, or cruise boat. All e-sims sell data plans that go with the e-sim. You don’t mix/match e-sims and data plans. You change your e-sim, you change your data plan.

Because we jump countries lots, we recommend Flexiroam. I buy 50G of global data at a time. It works in 182 countries and lasts me about 8-9 months. I pay about $125 for my data. But there are many e-sims out there with competing data plans and cheaper prices like Saily, Airalo and others. I like Flexiroam. When I cruise, I use the only e-sim provider out there for cruise/sea, and that’s GigSky. It costs less than the Cruise Ship Internet.

What My Phone Costs Me

Thus, my phone costs me $5 monthly for my phone number and about $175 a YEAR for all the data I need. I used to pay $175 a month to use Verizon in the USA. And guess what? You can do this EXACT same process in the USA and dump your Big Phone Company.

If you’d like to watch a video where we discuss all the details and explain this process verbally, watch here.

Please feel free to ask questions, but please also remember I am NOT tech support. I’m glad to ask general how to and high-level “I don’t understand the concept” questions, but when it comes to your particular phone and its set up, please reference Tello’s and Flexiroam’s tech support.

P.S. I did a complete review of four e-sims based on my usage worldwide. You can read that review here.

P.S.S My Paid Subscribers and Founding Members are reading my serialized novel, Kindling, and getting private chat access to me. Won’t you upgrade today?