Vodafone offers 4G roaming in 42 countries!

http://help.vodafone.co.uk/system/se...CLE_ID=2077589

Hope it's better than their 3G was in the UK!!!! I ditched Vodafone purely on how really awful their 3G coverage was about 12 months ago.

Are people getting any real benefits out of roaming on 4G?? ... data speeds when roaming are rarely as good as when in the UK

To be honest 4G roaming abroad isn't really a big deal for me as the networks which do offer it abroad, EE & Vodafone don't really offer big enough data allowances to make a good use of the speed.

If you use EuroTraveller with Vodafone, you could use your allowance, so technically up to 20GB.

And Vodafone.

EE and Three send all foreign traffic in a tunnel to the UK, so its unclear what is the foreign network speed, and what is congestion back to the UK. This tunnel means even when you're in the USA or in Italy, your IP address is a UK one.

I saw 7mbps on 4G roaming with EE in the US at Christmas, using the T-Mobile USA network. Turning 4G off gave speeds around 2.5mbps.

I think that the lower latency (even with the longer journey time back to the UK) and better speeds even with a poorer signal on LTE probably makes 4G better even if not getting 50Mbps or more as you might at home.

just came back from France.
My experience with Feel at home is that the carrier Orange was excellent, low latencies and fast speed expect in very specific occasions when I was in the middle of Paris with 1k's of people around.

However, when using Free, speeds and latencies were appalling. Latencies of 1000+ ms !!!

Well, I guess we know why it's called free....

I'm writing this from France on Feel at home and agree Free is awful, so I forced my phone to Orange F and it works amazing well.

Agree with the comments about Orange France's peformance, I always found this to be much better than their previous roaming partner Bouygues. (Kind of no suprise Orange F is the number 1 network in France )

All UK mobile networks do that, and I assume it's fairly standard for all mobile networks to direct via their home countries ?

That's correct. The EU was considering local break out to improve performance, but I'm not sure wherever that is still the plan. Perhaps there are some billing issues behind the current system (payg price updates etc).

3 have added Bouygues Telecom back to their roaming partners in France as of today.

You can now use: Free, Bouygues Telecom & Orange France *currently*

It started when PAYG roaming started, so I assume its the only way to validate PAYG credit.

Anything else due on the next few months for three like home?

Three is quickly becoming the best provider in the UK

You mean apart from Spain and New Zealand in April?

yep, other than Spain and New Zealand will we see any more additions?

I would expect Germany in the future only major EU country which isn't included now and perhaps Canada, Greece, Turkey in future as well. Later because they popular holiday destinations and former because it would be extremely useful for travellers.

Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal would all be good for Regular European travellers. Turkey would be great, but don't hold your breath. The rules for SIMs there don't even allow travellers to buy a local SIM card, so things are quite locked down there.

Canada would be brilliant for my US and Canada trip this summer! Can't be bothered with the hassle of trying to get a local sim while I'm in Canada.

I can see Canada being a sticky wicket. The Canadian mobile industry is not known for its competitive, innovative nature. At least the US has T-Mobile to shake things up, Canada doesn't really have that. Their attempt at introducing more competition through more network operators seems to be only mildly successful, with the upstarts having severely limited coverage and dubious futures (like 3 was in 2004 or 2005 but without the ability to build national networks)

So I'd be doubtful if 3 could negotiate a deal to permit this to work

Yeah I noticed that when researching pay as you go sims for Canada. Very expensive and nothing like the options we have here! It's very easy for a traveller coming to thee UK to get the £15 pay as you go deal on Three with unlimited data. My American friend has done this a few times and he can't express how easy it is!

I had the same when a Canadian friend came over (via a stopover in France).

He was amazed how we could walk into a T-Mobile shop, pay £10 and get 12 months' free internet (promotion at the time) about half an hour after getting off the Eurostar. He said it was even harder to get a SIM in France (as a non-resident) and in Canada he'd be paying far more to get anything remotely close to what he got here