It is what it is Tanya. Grabbing a cheap SIM card is definitely something we have done in the past and something we’ll continue to do here and there as we travel. However, with 4 of us now traveling together, sometimes it’s just easier and quicker to just turn on the Tep and we can all access the net at the same time.

We also don’t have to hunt down a place to find a SIM, as they’re often not in convenient locations, and can skip jumping through the hoops of registering for it, as some countries don’t allow foreigners to have local SIMs. We’re also not tied down to only having a single device with cell data that only works in that single country.

I’m not going to lie, they’re not for everyone and if you’re staying in one country for a long time and local SIMs offering tons of data are cheap and easy to come by then a local SIM for your cell might be the way to go. However, if you’re country jumping a lot, or there are multiple people in the group, or you need to easily work online from a laptop or tablet then international wireless hotspots are a great investment and can save you a ton of headaches.

As to unlimited internet, we find that the throttling varies from country to country and even 1GB a day is a ton more than you typically get in countries like Canada for instance where we pay through the nose for 4GB a month. We also find the internet is more than usable even after the eventual throttling so unless you plan to sit there streaming Netflix all day, getting your work done, browsing the net, checking out social media and uploading a few pics to the cloud are all possible.

Hi Tasha!

We had our Teppy with us on our last trip to South America, but unfortunately we were only in Ecuador, and the Tep doesn’t have coverage there. The Tep website says it has coverage in South America in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In Central America there’s Tep coverage in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, Saint Maarten, and The Caribbean Islands.

It should work on a cruise ship once it was docked but since it’s not satellite, it wouldn’t work while cruising out on the ocean. If the cruise ship blocks cell signals, then I’m afraid it would suffer the same fate but it would work once you were on land doing day trips and such so still great for maps, finding local hotspots and hidden gems. It would also allow you to connect to friends and family while you were land based.