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Comparison of costsData package or inclusive roaming: When is it worth?
Inclusive roaming for surfing and making calls abroad can cost a few francs to CHF 100 more per month. The comparison of 68 subscriptions.
Roaming at the cell phone subscription: That’s why it goes
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A comparison of 68 subscriptions shows that inclusive roaming can be worthwhile from 6 GB of annual data consumption.
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Alternatives such as travel ESI cards or foreign prepaid SIM cards are often cheaper.
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Abos with a lot of inclusive roaming are usually not useful for occasional trips abroad.
Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt and practically all other mobile phone providers offer cell phone subscriptions with inclusive roaming in order to be able to use a certain amount of data for mobile Internet and, depending on the subscription, also minutes of conversation and SMS at no extra charge.
But is the offer worth it or are roaming packages cheaper? The Moneyland comparison service made a comparison with 68 cell phone subscriptions from 15 providers during inclusive roaming. With some subscriptions, inclusive roaming only costs a few francs, others up to 100 francs more per month. The offer also differs greatly. Some offer only very small amounts of data from 100 MB per month, others up to 50 GB.
Some providers also advertise with unlimited data roaming. However, the trick on these subscriptions is that when the amount of data is reached, the internet speed is reduced to typically 128 to 256 kbit/s. That is enough for text messages and music streaming, watching videos is practically impossible with the speed.
When using the data volume, providers such as Swisscom, Coop Mobile and Digital Republic block internet access. With a data roaming package, you can then surf. Caution applies to cell phone subscriptions, with which you continue to surf the standard tariff. According to Moneyland, this is particularly the case with Salt and Post Mobile.
Calls abroad are not roaming
Attention: Calls from Switzerland on a foreign telephone number do not fall under roaming. Therefore, inclusive roaming services of the mobile phone subscription cannot be used for this conversations for most providers.
Mostly, the inclusive roaming in neighboring countries, depending on the package, also applies in other EU countries, the USA and the United Kingdom. Sometimes, as with Spusu, French Guyana, Guadeloupe, La Réunion, Martinique and Mayotte or Lebara and Yallo Puerto Rico are also there. While Croatia and Slovenia are in many subscriptions, this does not apply to many subscriptions from Salt, Gomo, Lidl Connect and Post Mobile.
Moneyland created an analysis up to which annual data roaming volume a cell phone subscription without inclusive roaming with the same provider is cheaper than the corresponding cell phone subscription with inclusive roaming. The comparison service then calculated which data volume in the form of annual data roaming packages can be bought for the difference.
The result: In the best case, a cell phone subscription with inclusive roaming is already cheaper than a cell phone subscription with data roaming package every year. However, this only applies if less than 2 GB of data is transmitted abroad in every calendar month. However, some subscriptions only pays off 100 GB of data roaming annually.
With four subscriptions from Wingo and two subscriptions from Yallo, Moneyland found astonishing festival: These subscriptions are so expensive that even then they are not cheaper than the cheapest subscription if the entire data roaming quantity contained is completely used up every month.
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Travel ESIM card: According to Moneyland, travel cards can usually save a lot of money from the roaming offers of Swiss providers.
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Foreign prepaid SIM card: The purchase of a foreign prepaid SIM card in the travel destination is often much cheaper than roaming with the Swiss cell phone subscription.
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FREE-WLAN: Free WiFi are available in many cafes, restaurants, hotels, in trains, in buses, in public places and in many other places.
What is certain is that if you only travel abroad occasionally, especially for individual excursions and during the holidays, for your own cell phone subscriptions with a lot of inclusive roaming, unless it is an action offer. Otherwise you pay the roaming with the expensive subscription in the months in which you are at home in Switzerland. The situation is different if, for example, customers are often on the road abroad for professional reasons.
A cheap mobile phone subscription with a little inclusive roaming-about 1 GB-also makes sense for people who live near the border-since the smartphone is occasionally logged into a foreign network.
If you do not know how much roaming is necessary, the following rule of thumb can remember: Without music and video streaming or other big downloads, it should not be more than 5 to 10 GB in a week, often even much less.
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