Data abroad driving me mad

Tesco Unlimited SIM at £30 per month works well for us. We've used it for 9 weeks in Europe since September 2025 with no issues. I use it in a ZTE U50 MiFi unti. Seamless, charge free roaming and generally better speeds and coverage in Europe than we get at home. On the U50 you must enable roaming on the device as well as the SIM. Once that is done it roams freely anywhere in Europe. We were streaming TNT Sport and iPlayer etc so we're heavy data users.
 
Just had an e-mail from motorhome Wi-Fi (a great company to deal with) saying any future router development would probably include a facility to use an e-sim , so that may be the way to go in the future. Thanks for all your replies.
 
Hettie's Crew said:
Sat in Mons, Belgium watching Coronation Street on the smart telly, through YouTube using my phone as a hot spot with our unlimited free roaming pass from EE.
No idea how we got unlimited roaming but we’ve checked with EE several times and have texts confirming we can use our full plan.
The router is switched off as the sim in that doesn’t have roaming.
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You must of at some time specified this as an “ add on “ to your plan albeit a free add on . You can swap them so when you come home you can choose a different add on and swap again when you go abroad . It’s what I have and do .
 
A word of warning to those who have successfully used tesco mobile in the past.
Last autumn we spent 9 weeks in France and Tesco mobile worked a treat on the Orange F network.
I have been in France for the past week and what a difference! My connection is abysmal🫥. I'm thinking of going to buy a local sim tomorrow.
I can't access the Orange network at all. I'm only able to connect to SFR - and this, only on a very sketchy basis. During most of the day I can't use google maps to find aires through SFS. I can't use some apps eg Méteo and Lidl 😮. The only time when I have any useable connection is in the evening - as now.
Meanwhile, Graham has a brilliant, fast connection through EE and Orange F.
I'm not a happy bunny.
 
I was just reading that O2 are now offering a satellite service, currently only available for Samsung S25 and S26, you can only send messages and use app data not calls, it uses starlink satellites, and is included in their full works package or £3.50/month as an addon. It may be the future as it's further developed.

O2 Satellite | Connection that's essential for living https://share.google/gE1wb2cW9ePW4ZEBh
 
bellabee said:
I can't access the Orange network at all. I'm only able to connect to SFR - and this, only on a very sketchy basis. During most of the day I can't use google maps to find aires through SFS. I can't use some apps eg Méteo and Lidl 😮. The only time when I have any useable connection is in the evening - as now.
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Can I ask, have you tried changing the network connection manually? I had to do that in Spain a few times when moving about.

Cheers,

Jock. :)
 
Carpmart said:
Everyone will say I’ve got this and that SIM and it gives me 4.5Gb here and 3.75Gb there and a whopping 20Gb somewhere else.

The reality is, it’s a pain in the butt trying to data hop, swap SIMs, manage usage etc.

The answer is Starlink. You’ll now get people saying it’s too expensive and Musk is the worst person in the world etc etc. the reality is, ubiquitous high bandwidth, work anywhere data is only available from Starlink!
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Some say Musk’s Starlinks are seriously helping keep someone out of Ukraine
 
Barriesimpson said:
I thought they hadn't made an agreement with the European tariffs.
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Barrie, perhaps you meant Switzerland?

I think not all UK or EU mobile plans include it.

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CAB96 said:
Barrie, perhaps you meant Switzerland?

I think not all UK or EU mobile plans include it.
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Yes Switzerland is definitely not included, if you read my Irish raid thread you'll remember our €15.000 bill from them 😀.
 
Update on my earlier post re poor connection through Tesco.
We have now moved south to just north of Limoges and my connection is good👍.
When I was experiencing problems, we were in Normandy and the Loire.
Maybe it's a geographical thing or maybe it's because it's the weekend.🤔
Whatever, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the improvement will persist.
Life on the road without internet is so much more difficult.
I Think I've forgotten how to function without it.
 
Has anybody tried Broadband Go Sims for their router? Mostly we use our EE roaming allowance on our phones, but sometimes it would useful to use the router with its arial when signal is poor. We had a trial Sim free with the router, and I was considering buying an annual plan for £59 which gives you 2GB per month. I'd be interested if anyone has any feedback on their supposed "multi-network connectivity.
 
In Brittany, tried to used Tesco unlimited £15 / 25GB in my ZTE 5001 - would not connect / limited service and zilch in Meneham. Worked fine in the Uk and when we got off the ferry at Roscoff. Suspect it is down to the French providers Tesco have contracted. Whipped out the Tesco SIM and replaced it with a Reglo 250Gb from leclerc, Plougastel - fantastic. Thank You funsters, your comments saved the day.
 
Leggit said:
In Brittany, tried to used Tesco unlimited £15 / 25GB in my ZTE 5001 - would not connect / limited service and zilch in Meneham. Worked fine in the Uk and when we got off the ferry at Roscoff. Suspect it is down to the French providers Tesco have contracted. Whipped out the Tesco SIM and replaced it with a Reglo 250Gb from leclerc, Plougastel - fantastic. Thank You funsters, your comments saved the day.
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Did you set the Tesco APN before leaving the UK? You can manually search for different networks, if necessary.
 
I've been mostly OK with my Tesco for the past few days in the Dordogne.

Have phone set to autoselect and have mainly been on Free.

Last year in France I was on Orange all the time and it worked great.

Haven't been able to get onto Orange at all this year.

Had a bad episode on Sunday, staying in the exact same place where I had no problems with Tesco last October.

Agree with Leggit re Tesco's French providers.
 
Silverman said:
Chat gpt tells me it's "sl2sfr"
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Memory says same. You do need to manually configure it for it to work anywhere other than France. Our MU5001 worked in France but not across the border until that was configured (with the sim on "auto" mode).
 
bellabee said:
I've been mostly OK with my Tesco for the past few days in the Dordogne.

Have phone set to autoselect and have mainly been on Free.
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Worth noting Free is the worst of the French network. John my French resident friend used to use them until he too switched to Reglo -> Free are an odd one as they are very cheap if you have your home broadband via them as well as mobile, less so if it's just mobile.

But because of the above a lot of French (domestic) customers use Free as it's "near Free" with the home broadband, and as such congested.

(I thought it's worth noting this because many funster will be unaware Free is effectively a odd network unlike any in UK).

We used to use Free (on a French Free) sim when visiting, but don't anymore.
 
I don't think it's just Tesco users who are being choked, and nor just by French data providers. In previous years using iD Mobile (Three), we've rarely suffered poor signal strength when abroad using a MiFi, but this year we have, both in France and in Spain.
This has not been experienced with normal internet browsing and email, etc, but with streaming UK TV via a 4K Firestick, despite the picture quality settings being adjusted downwardly. Umpteen times I've had to change provider manually, because after a short period of time, the same signal strength (without moving location), is suddenly not good enough to stream. Certain providers won't allow a connection.

Can the roaming partners detect how much data you are using as an individual, and thereby choke it? 🤷

Cheers,

Jock. :)
 
JockandRita said:
I don't think it's just Tesco users who are being choked, and nor just by French data providers. In previous years using iD Mobile (Three), we've rarely suffered poor signal strength when abroad using a MiFi, but this year we have, both in France and in Spain.
This has not been experienced with normal internet browsing and email, etc, but with streaming UK TV via a 4K Firestick, despite the picture quality settings being adjusted downwardly. Umpteen times I've had to change provider manually, because after a short period of time, the same signal strength (without moving location), is suddenly not good enough to stream. Certain providers won't allow a connection.

Can the roaming partners detect how much data you are using as an individual, and thereby choke it? 🤷

Cheers,

Jock. :)
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Yes Jock.

When you connect via the HLR of the network you’re roaming to, you are assigned a profile as an in roamer and on a low priority (cheap) home (in your case UK) MVNO plan. This equates to shaped traffic to provide priority to their own customers and to ‘in roamers’ on higher priority plans.

This is not a new situation.
 
JockandRita said:
Thanks Harvey, however, it's only this time round that I've experienced it in France and Spain, and I didn't experience it in Northern Europe back in September.

Cheers,

Jock. :)
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You probably did, it’s not personal to your connection, you just didn’t notice it as you were either using in less contended periods or areas and clearly on different networks in Northern Europe.

When travelling, you are not on 3UK (ID Mobile), you are on whatever network you roam to. So it’s the treatment of you as an MVNO in roamer to whatever network you’re using, which determines the assigned priority, shaping and overall experience.

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Carpmart said:
You probably did, it’s not personal to your connection, you just didn’t notice it as you were either using in less contended periods or areas and clearly on different networks in Northern Europe.

When travelling, you are not on 3UK (ID Mobile), you are on whatever network you roam to. So it’s the treatment of you as an MVNO in roamer to whatever network you’re using, which determines the assigned priority, shaping and overall experience.
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It's also based on how much the foriegn network charges UK. They can as mentioned apply "speed controls" if thats too expensive to reduce their peak spend given when you roaming your provider. Both the roaming partner (ie, Orange in France say) and say Three in UK (the roaming network) both can do this, the former to proetct their "own" customers experience at busy places, the second to reduce cost/spend as mentions.

Many providers these days limit throughput to 10-20Mbit a second, on an underlying network when natively (non-roaming) would do 200Mbit.

Some (naughtly) UK providers only apply the speed restriction once they've seen say 300Mbyte of data transferred. So you have perfect TV initially then it stops about 5-10 minutes of use. If thats what you see, chances are it's your parent provider, not the French.

There are however in most countries legal restrictions on doing this on non-roaming customers -> it's legal, and common practise to offer a 1Gb a month user a lower rate than a unlimited, but it's usually not as common to start a speed restriction after 1Gb transferred. Some countries have legislation specifically prohibiting the latter point with the aim they treat all customers the same.

It's the main reason I mention on here to use local sims where possible as these are usually never subject to same speed controls. Reglo as an example appply different speed lanes depending on your package (so if you ahve a 1G package (the 1 euro one) you only get 4G and a peak speed thats about 5-10Mbit, where if you have the 350Gb max package you get 5g access + no peak limited speeds.

When we are in France we have one personal contract on EE, and one on Three. We tend not to use these as they are slower and data restricted, they are our "usage" until we get the Reglo one up and running in the van, when we then disable data on the phones. EE tend to apply less speed controls.
Personally I stopped using O2 around 2019 mostly due to the very poor roaming coverage, with speed limits applied everywhere at the time.
 
Silverman said:
Can anyone tell me the APN for a Reglo sim?
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This is the screenshot I took before removing sim from my phone, in case mifi didn’t auto connect

1777533494382.png
 
starquake said:
It's also based on how much the foriegn network charges UK. They can as mentioned apply "speed controls" if thats too expensive to reduce their peak spend given when you roaming your provider. Both the roaming partner (ie, Orange in France say) and say Three in UK (the roaming network) both can do this, the former to proetct their "own" customers experience at busy places, the second to reduce cost/spend as mentions.

Many providers these days limit throughput to 10-20Mbit a second, on an underlying network when natively (non-roaming) would do 200Mbit.

Some (naughtly) UK providers only apply the speed restriction once they've seen say 300Mbyte of data transferred. So you have perfect TV initially then it stops about 5-10 minutes of use. If thats what you see, chances are it's your parent provider, not the French.

There are however in most countries legal restrictions on doing this on non-roaming customers -> it's legal, and common practise to offer a 1Gb a month user a lower rate than a unlimited, but it's usually not as common to start a speed restriction after 1Gb transferred. Some countries have legislation specifically prohibiting the latter point with the aim they treat all customers the same.

It's the main reason I mention on here to use local sims where possible as these are usually never subject to same speed controls. Reglo as an example appply different speed lanes depending on your package (so if you ahve a 1G package (the 1 euro one) you only get 4G and a peak speed thats about 5-10Mbit, where if you have the 350Gb max package you get 5g access + no peak limited speeds.

When we are in France we have one personal contract on EE, and one on Three. We tend not to use these as they are slower and data restricted, they are our "usage" until we get the Reglo one up and running in the van, when we then disable data on the phones. EE tend to apply less speed controls.
Personally I stopped using O2 around 2019 mostly due to the very poor roaming coverage, with speed limits applied everywhere at the time.
Click to expand...

The key point in this post for everyone is you can reset your data session by manually switching to another roaming network, then back to your preferred roaming network. This switches you to a new IP address and new Home Location Register timer and can sometimes improve the shaping for a period of time.
 
starquake said:
So you have perfect TV initially then it stops about 5-10 minutes of use. If thats what you see, chances are it's your parent provider, not the French.
Click to expand...
That is exactly what I experienced, especially in Spain when too far south to get a satellite signal, so dependent on data.

I also noted that when I got fed up with it all, I used my phone instead as a WiFi hotspot (Lebara sim on Vodafone network), and never suffered a lack of a decent signal for streaming. 🤷

Cheers,

Jock. :)
 

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