I’m hoping someone here has recent experience and can tell me how things worked out.
We have international data and sms built into our plans and really, that’s all we need. We know we’re covered there.
We’ll be travelling lesser-known and well-known sites in Italy and I’m concerned about connection quality and connection speeds. We did okay in the past, but always found ourselves doing anything meaningful when we got back to our room (WiFi).
Does anyone know if we should expect 2G, LTE, 5G?
Genoa-Cinque Terre (area)-Florence-Rome
I would expect LTE but prepare for 2G. I went through the Abruzzo area back in 2020 (pre covid) and I was getting LTE signal. If you are near the bigger towns/tourist areas you should be able to jump on the local networks.
I was in most of those areas this last April and May, stayed in Rome, visited Florence, cinque terra, Naples, sienna, Verona, parts of Abruzzo and Amalfi.
my wife’s tmo line did fine. Italy has very good coverage, albeit at slow speeds for its plans. She complained a few times, but really, it was “this is so slow today” as she’s trying to upload 50pics to Facebook. Her phone showed lte and 5g signal, but saw the expected 256k cap.
Truthfully, I relied on a prepay line from Vodafone (€30 eSIM, and $€15 mo after) for my trip as it had 50gb of high speed (+hotspot) data, texting and 200min calling. TIM had something cheaper if you have a physical sim (€15). And Wind did something else for similar, called traveler line aimed at tourists.
While the second line screwed with how my contacts showed up by showing country codes to phone calls and text, it was worth it (just add +1 to your contact to fix). Even if I don’t stay for 2 months, I’ll do it again. €30 on vacation is nothing, even for a short trip (just need a cc and passport).