How to stop paying data roaming charges when you’re travelling

When it comes to data, globalisation is a lie, as anyone who’s made a phone call or used the web on a smartphone while abroad will know all too well. While more and more of us travel and use our smartphones and tablets aboard, exorbitant international roaming charges just won’t go away. So how can you escape them?

One of the cheapest ways for international travellers to reduce the cost of calls and data (which is what most of us are really after) is to buy a local SIM card. That’s easy to do in Hong Kong, but it can be impossible in many countries – including China and Singapore – that demand registration, proof of residency and identification documents.

In fact, visitors to Hong Kong are spoilt for choice, with a plethora of cheap prepaid SIM cards to choose from provided by China Mobile, China Unicom, CSL and others. Others are designed to work around Asia, such as Three’s International Roaming Rechargeable SIM (HK$48), which gives special roaming rates in China, Macau, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand.

Visitors to Europe should know that data roaming charges within the EU will be scrapped in June 2017, so any local SIM card will work across the European Union (including the UK until it leaves the EU in two years’ time). But there are issues if you buy a local SIM card; you have to travel with multiple, often tiny SIM cards in your possession, swap them in and out, and you have to find a SIM that physically fits your phone (iPhone-sized nano SIM cards are harder to find).

An easy way to get around all this is to use a phone with individual slots for memory card and SIMs, which are common in Hong Kong. If you do have a dual-SIM phone, there are an increasing number of low-cost international roaming deals around, but there is one major drawback. “The challenge is that using multiple SIMs means you cannot always keep your number while travelling,” says John Devlin, a telecoms analyst at Futuresource Consulting. It gets more complex, too; to roam in Japan and Korea only phones that support 3G-UMTS work, while for the USA, a triband phone (which operates on three broadband frequencies) is required.