International cell phone plans

Tech, Travel

What to do while we plan to be out of the country for a while? Since we plan on returning back to California after our adventures in Japan, we have a couple of needs for our existing cell phones/numbers.

  • Retain our cell phone numbers so we don’t lose them while we’re away.
  • Flexibility to use our phone while we’re abroad without being gouged.
  • Receive texts/calls even if we rarely need to.

Some things we looked into.

  • Putting our accounts/numbers on hold (via our existing AT&T carrier) wasn’t possible for longer than 3 months.
  • Numberbarn can retain your number for a low fee of $2 a month, so this would keep my number dormant and can be reactivated when we return. This sounds like a decent fall back if paying for some service is too high.
  • We found some expensive international plans that give unlimited data/voice from a number of carriers, but making/receiving international calls while in Japan wasn’t a great option. We will want at least one local number for convenience.

So our best current solution for convenience and cost:

  • Use the GoogleFi “Flexible” (cheap) plan which costs a base price of $18 a month or $35 for 2 numbers.
  • Obtain a local Japanese cell sim/plan for about $20 a line to get a local number/data.
  • The plan charges $10/GB for data, so excessive use of data would be expensive. However, we would use a local sim/plan so we won’t be using much data except when traveling outside of Japan and during our move/transitions. We only use a couple of GB a month today, since we connect via wifi at home most of the time.
  • The nice thing about the GoogeFi plans are that international texts are free and data works for the same rate in most countries. Intl calls would be $.20/min but that should be rare. Since we mainly text with friends/family, this arrangement should work well!
  • One caveat, GoogleFi does not want long term international use, so we might get cut off after several months. We won’t be using it much in Japan, but we might have to go with the Numberbarn option if that happens.

We won’t really know until we try out the service, but it looks like we could be paying around the same we do today ($80/month for 2 lines) for keeping our US numbers and also getting a local one too!