If your summer vacationplans are still forthcoming, or you are going to take advantage of some great autumn/winter travel discounts, you may want to think about how you’ll stay connected to your family, friends and the office while overseas. U.S. cell phone carriers all have plans that range from $10-20 per day per device and some charge even more than that to stay connected. You’ll definitely want to call your carrier and see what the best deal is with them.
OR….you can do what I do and pre-pay for a Mi-Fi unit rental that services the country/countries you will be visiting. Mi-Fi is used to describe a wireless router that acts as mobile Wi-Fi hotspot. The nice thing about renting a Mi-Fi for your travels is that the Mi-Fi unit is already connected to foreign internet service providers and often allows you to connect more than one smart phone/tablet or laptop at the same time.
Recently, I traveled to Italy and rented a Mi-Fi unit from Wi-Tourist (https://www.witourist.com/ ) for the low price of EUR 4.95 per day. This particular service allowed me to connect up to 10 devices simultaneously to it and offered 4G-LTE signal throughout Italy (even on remote Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily). The benefit was that I didn’t incur any fees from my U.S. carrier (Verizon) and was able to keep my smart phone and iPad in “airplane mode” throughout my travels. Despite being in airplane mode, I still had full (and fast) internet connectivity. The only thing I couldn’t do was call anyone using my iPhone (although I was able to place calls to my family using WhatsApp and Apple’s FaceTime). I was also very much able to respond to and/or forward work emails to my team back in the U.S. so that business would not suffer as a result of my remote travels.
Most international destinations now offer Mi-Fi devices for rent in countries including Italy, France, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Israel and Spain/Portugal. As busy lawyers, while we want to unwind and disconnect, many of us are still drawn to our smart phones to just check on things back in the U.S. I would highly recommend renting one of these devices so you know precisely what the fees for internet connectivity will be while abroad and you won’t incur any surprise charges.
Steve Best, Partner
Affinity Consulting Group
sbest@affinityconsulting.com