The latte rush season has become a familiar ritual for people who travel regularly – there’s no approved, safe Wi-Fi to depend on, and if you forget to include the password, and when you need it the most, it simply won’t work. It was an involved three-piece solution before. Many travelers today have dropped the last and most important link in that chain – as soon as travelers roll into the country with eSIM Plus, they get connected, even after attaching a data plan before they travel. Below are some suggestions about how to think about connectivity at various points along a journey, and where the areas of the journey still have some friction.
Airport Wi-Fi: Useful, But Never the Whole Plan
The quality and connectivity of flight Wi-Fi has significantly improved in the past decade, but changes in standards, coverage, and quality vary greatly from airport to airport. Some airports offer seemingly effortless entry into their terminals – no hassle with signing up for anything. Others set a more restrictive limit of thirty minutes of your time. Others restrict your speeds unless you pay for a better subscription, and others have an extremely obtuse entry page which will never “pop” on a crappy internet connection.
But there's a larger issue – you are only connected to the airport’s wireless in one of the terminals. As soon as you move towards the jet bridge by your gate, you move into another connector in another building, or you step onto any other location, and it’s right back to the hunt again. Imagine every time a frequent traveller, who may have a company jet and flies four or five times per month, finds himself having to repeat that each time. It is a good amount of time being squandered for the many who use the company’s jet two or 3 times a month and now end up having to repeat the procedure again and again.
If you’ve got to use it, then keep these simple tips in mind to make airport Wi-Fi more reliable. It is sometimes useful to save the hops you have to travel to and from various airports, as some have a unique SSID that it will detect instead of the first one that it sees. I would even say be apprehensive of anything that asks for a password. What is ok to be suspicious of is a log-in screen that requires a password – an invasion screen for a public network.
Most usefully, take advantage of the Wi-Fi services at the airport as an added bonus when access is seemingly more demanding and time-consuming, like downloading the PDF version of the boarding pass, not for the entire day of the flight. All of these things only take a second, but all put together make airport Wi-Fi into a useful experience.
In-Flight Internet: Managing Expectations
Wi-Fi connectivity on long-haul and transcontinental flights now goes from the “novelty stage” to the “almost promised” – but as is often the case with air travel, there are massive differences among airlines, aircraft and routes. The messaging-tier access is now being offered for free by some carriers, and the full browsing and streaming capabilities are for sale.
If you can save what you need before the flight, you can save the in-flight bandwidth for it, offline maps, pre-downloaded shows, documents, and so on – anything you don’t need, you can do without. A potentially helpful tidbit of route knowledge that frequent flyers wishing to fly the same routes repeatedly will learn is which routes have reliable Wi-Fi.
The Moment You Land: Why This Is the Real Bottleneck
Although there are three stages, the most problematic with regard to connectivity is the landing, and only the traveller can control it. You step onto the plane, and your phone searches for a network – and it matters a lot depending on your roaming options with your cell provider: whether you’ll pay for data use you didn’t plan for, be denied all data use and Internet connections, or be in the queue alongside the kiosk that’s longer than the one you’ve just finished at immigration.
This is what it’s most clearly filling in for an eSIM. Having a regional-specific data plan or country-specific data plan is similar to having that profile installed in your phone prior to your flight, and you will have it in your phone when you arrive to activate. You no longer need to go to kiosks, and no plastic data plan is needed to find a store that is open at your flight’s predicted time of arrival.
The installation of the setup is simple. Before traveling, confirm compatibility with eSIM and unlock your phone. Ensure the data plan is downloaded on home Wi-Fi for travel, and be sure to label the new profile to prevent the profile from being confused with the original profile. Two communication lines are possible in numerous handsets, keeping your home SIM for incoming calls and messages while the second SIM (the eSIM profile) is meant for data only, perfect for users who still expect to get a call from family or a colleague while on vacation. It is carried out the night before a flight, and no connectivity is considered for landing day.
Building a Connectivity Routine Around Frequent Travel
Trying to find Wi-Fi at the airport, on board, and connecting to the local SIM when you arrive every few days is a pain, but it’s one that’s OK for those travelling only occasionally. It can be a lot of work doing it 12 times a year – particularly if you work out on a monthly basis or more. Once you have flown many times, you start to have a better flight routine:
- Avoid using airport Wi-Fi as a secure network – it is a tool to utilize the Internet more on board the plane;
- having in-flight Wi-Fi will provide you with one way to text – the rest is gravy;
- ensure that you have a destination eSIM in place prior to travelling so that connection that matters – your connection that you will need the moment you land – is already active;
- know exactly where and which airline(s) you have the best connection with, and it will be a lot easier over time when you begin booking airline tickets and other arrangements.
None of these three layers – terminal Wi-Fi, cabin Internet, and Landing Day data – has to be perfect in itself. The problem is that what is most important is the weakest point in any scramble, which for most travelers means the scramble post-landing, and that is overcome before the trip. The first part, from the airport to the airplane, is one which a traveler can control perfectly to the best of his/her capability once he/she has it to his/her residence. Plan accordingly, and it’s more of a story that unfolds after that.