A trip to Japan

Just came back from a two-week trip to Japan and figured I'd write things up before I forget. Things naturally being wireless-related

I opted to get both for myself and my wife 1GB SIM; it was reasonably priced and didn't have daily limits on data. I had the SIM cards shipped to the post office at the terminal, so we were up & running pretty soon after we arrived.

On my Nexus 6P I popped the new SIM in, configured the APN as documented and was up and running. On my wife's iPhone I popped in the SIM, installed profile when prompted and she was up and running as well.

I ended up using about 600MB and my wife about 850MB. Our usage was uneven, ranging from 20-30MB on the low end to 150-170MB on the high end (daily), showing that I was right in avoiding the 100MB/day plan.

On my Nexus 6P I had HSPA+ almost everywhere we went (there was one place near the Tokyo Edo Museum where I briefly had LTE). My wife had LTE everywhere on her iPhone 6. It didn't really matter as both the LTE and HSPA seemed to be capped pretty low (about 2 down, 0.5 up).

When we came back, I popped my AT&T SIM back in and I was up and running as the phone has switched to the AT&T APN automatically. Then I popped my wife's AT&T SIM back in and naturally she had no internet. Took me quite a bit of digging to find where that other profile was and to delete it. No, I don't remember where it was but I'm confident I'll be able to find it again if needed (I did not have to install/remove any profiles while swapping to and from the Russian SIM).

The variety of the phones in Japan is staggering. There were a lot of iPhones, but the Android landscape was not nearly as heavily slanted towards Samsung as I've seen in Europe and see here. I've seen a few Xperia phones, some Samsungs and a lot of different brands I wasn't able to identify. Plenty of flips (Android), some weird Android something that when unfolded resembles a T (the horizontal being the screen) and other Androids ranging in size from <4" to 6"+.

I think that's all of my observations in the wireless world

 

Thanks for the kind words, but I think @charlyee has been doing that from time to time

 

Nope, they were on a different island. With BT, do you buy a new throwaway SIM every time? How much?

My wife has a habit of posting everything she comes across on Facebook, so data is mighty important

 

• About $30 per SIM
• NTT DoCoMo
• Lack of bands on the Nexus 6P, the iPhone 6 was on LTE all the time.
• Can't really say, I wasn't trying to see which bands are actually in use
• There's free Wi-Fi in a number of places: subway, JR stations, supermarkets and so on. But as there aren't offline maps for Japan (at least in Here maps) I would want to have the coverage all the time, so I would say not a 100% viable.

 

Thanks! Is there an option for top up? The Japanese SIM I bought had a top up with 500mb for about $12 and 1gb for about $18. Or do you just buy another "plan" for another €10 or €20?

Oh, and I use Hangouts or Vonage to make calls from abroad. Vonage also allows me to make international calls.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

 

Hmm, so with BT you can either get 500MB for two weeks for €20 or you can get a 1GB for two weeks for €20 (500MB/€10 + 500/€10). Sneaky

Orange Holiday card sounds like a rip-off.

 

Ah yes, when I go to Russia I put in a local MTS SIM in both our phones. Both Android & iPhone didn't require any additional action to have the internet working when I did that. In contrast both phones required an extra config step for the data to work on the Japanese DoCoMo SIM.

 

Nope, both our phones stay in English when a foreign country SIM is inserted, but I haven't tried French SIM cards. Russian/Czech/Hungarian/Japanese, although the Japanese was a data only.

 

Good questions, @viewfly. Yes, roaming with AT&T is definitely a possibility, but prohibitively expensive compared to what we did. In fact, if I were going alone I'd probably opt to rent a portable Wi-Fi which costs about $65 for a two-week period IIRC. With it's 1GB/per day total limit (14GB for two weeks) with no actual daily limits and connecting up to 10 devices simultaneously at blazing fast speeds it out-values the AT&T roaming deal by a huge margin. The only ability I lose in this scenario is sending messages to international numbers which I don't use all that often anyway. And the 300MB limit for two weeks is completely unrealistic for my wife as she used over 800MB while also hooking up to every Wi-Fi spot we came across I could have possibly pulled it off but I would have felt severely constrained.

Flip-phone screen size: huge compared to old flips; relatively small compared to modern day smartphones. My estimation is with the exception of that T-shaped one (regular flips) were all at about 3.7-4" screen sizes.

Phones in public transportation: they're not banned, but there's an etiquette to using them. They're "not allowed" next to priority seating (elderly/pregnant/etc.) and in general they ask you to mute your phones or if you're talking to step outside the car. The latter is very easy to do on the Shinkansen, less so on local trains or subways where there are practically no vestibule. But everybody has their phone out and are playing/reading all the time.

Also, these days Google Maps have most everything we looked at in both English and Japanese, which made asking the cab driver to take you somewhere pretty easy We only took one cab ride, but the driver's English vocabulary consisted of the name of the person who reserved the taxi and thank you so without the Google Maps we would have been forced to ask the hotel staff to translate for us. They never have a problem with it, but it seems like it exceeds their normal duties and since they don't accept tips I never felt comfortable asking them to do anything that wasn't their actual job.

 

We were texting using the Google Voice number, so it was just as easy My wife was in constant touch with the kid throughout. I suspect she could have used the iMessage as well, although I don't know that for a fact.

I got a chuckle out of how easy it was for her to use the iPad. She didn't even realize that the phone went into the hotspot mode as she was chewing through the data That day was her highest usage, nearly 200MB as she has found some deal that allowed us to save about $50 by rebooking our hotel with a new promo. It probably didn't make any difference that she wasn't using the AT&T SIM except for the amount of data used.

 

Well, the software did get in the way, at least on the iPhone Only on the way back though. All my other swaps before were completely transparent, with APN being auto-configured by the phones without my knowledge. I suspect it may have something to do with the way the DoCoMo SIM is programmed, but if Android could figure it out I'm sure iOS could too. Not sure why they chose to not to.

 

Naturally you won't have to change anything if you're using AT&T SIM, technically it's not any different than roaming domestically. But since with all other foreign SIM card I used I didn't have to change anything either it was a surprise that it didn't "just work" as usual.

I'm surprised you had to remind AT&T you were planning to roam — back in the day when I did use roaming I never had to do anything.

Sent from my SM-T320 using Tapatalk

 

You're right, I'm used to taking these small miracles for granted