Solis Roaming Data

Mobile data while roaming is both salvation and a nightmare. It helps a lot from the moment you touch down at a new place. But due to astronomically high roaming charges, travelers very often fear to turn it on, trying to rely on sporadic open WiFi hotspots.

Companies like Truphone have solved most of that already. I have been using Truphone for 5 years now, with a great success. But most is not all and even Truphone with its global plan covering more than 100 countries, while covering "most", they still do not cover them all.

Fortunately, there are several companies addressing the roaming data problem. When planning my recent trip to Kazakhstan, I decided to go with Skyroam, selecting their Solis device.

The idea is simple: it is a personal WiFi access point that magically links to the cloud in a way that costs you around 8 EUR per 24 hours. And you can connect multiple devices.

I selected the Solis for two reasons. One was the battery lifetime, advertised to be 16+ hours, which I confirm is true. On my first day in Kazakhstan, I landed in Almaty at 3:20 AM and turned it on, it kept on running through the whole day and still had some juice letf late in the evening.

The reason number two has been the USB-C charging port (and an option to act as a databank, which I don't need for the Blackberry, but in general it may be useful). Unfortunately the USB-C does not work as advertised and the company mysteriously went silent on the support thread. Despite pinging them, multiple times, the last thing I heard from them about 10 days ago was "forwarded your concern to our VIP Support Team so we can further check on your issue".

But setting the USB-C issue aside, the thing has been working well. To the extent that I had a long voice call using WhatsApp, and the quality was extremely good, much better than a phone conversation. Also the per-dfay model is waaaay better than the per-MegaByte. Nobody knows how much data they will use nowadays (hint: it may be as much as 1.5GB when you sleep).

Which brings me to the point that legacy mobile carriers are pushing themselves into a corner by not offering timed (versus data volume - based) roaming bundles and charging unreasonable premium for their basic services (such as voice calls) when roaming.