I like going on vacation to Austria. One of the reasons is that I have a SIM card from local operator “Drei” (Hutchison Three) that gives me unlimited Internet access over 3G (sadly not LTE) for 18 Euros per month. In other countries, I had to be bit more careful with my daily data usage while traveling. But at least for Europe things have changed to the better in the past months once again.
Data charges are fortunately on the decline and with the vision of a single telecommunication market in Europe and the EUs push for the final removal of roaming charges in 2017 I now have a subscription with my home network operator in Germany with a 10 GB data bucket I can use in Germany, the EU and a number of other non-EU countries in Europe such as Switzerland.
10 GB is a lot and while one has to still slightly restrain oneself a bit when it comes to endless Skype video conferencing on the PC and endless Netflix and Youtube video streaming as they each consume around 1 to 2 GB of data per hour, I noticed that I don’t even bother anymore to check if a hotel’s WiFi network is any good or not. If they usually were I’d perhaps bother. However, more often than not, hotel WiFi networks are unreliable and slow, especially in the evening hours (so forget about Netflix and Youtube streaming anyway…).
This is a wonderful development and it takes traveling in Europe once again a bit closer to what it should be: Roam like home!