Temporary SIM card while visiting US [duplicate]

There are many options you can have as far as mobile phone/data prepaid plans are concerned.

Since you need coverage along the route between major metropolitan areas you may want to look at getting a plan from one of the major carriers directly like:

• AT&T GoPhone

or

• T-Mobile

There are other providers that you may be able to look at but they have pretty decent coverage in the metropolitan areas like LA or Las Vegas but may have problems outside cities.

The coverage maps area fairly accurate for both AT&T and T-Mobile so you can look at those.

willmyphonework.net is good for checking a phone's compatibility with the various networks.

Suggestion: before departure, print out a list of the carriers your phone will work with. Hard copy is the way to go here -- otherwise, you'll find yourself (as I once did) standing in a Walmart, using your home provider's expensive roaming to sort through the huge array of SIM choices on offer...

You may want to check your existing phone plan, for example quite a few providers in the UK offer free (Three) or cheap roaming with data included, this often has the benefit of roaming over multiple US providers giving you better coverage. Some providers even do this with Pay as you Go plans.

Last time I was in the USA I was flipping between Verizon and T-Mobile which ever offered better coverage. Although doing this calls home will be cheap, calls to US numbers will still be expensive, but we worked out it was cheaper than getting a US SIM.

On your phone it should cover most things but the big bands its missing is the 700mhz required for T-Mobile LTE and any form of CDMA (Verizon although they do have GSM bands as well). My phone (Lumia 930) didn't have those either and I was still able to use it everywhere I wanted to but I found 3G fast enough.

Also make sure your phone is unlocked IE Not locked to your local phone provider.

If you decide to get a US sim, quite a few of them are available on eBay so you can buy and get it setup and tested before you leave so if you have to get your phone unlocked you can do it at home.

If your main goal is price, MetroPCS has no-contract, $30/month plans which have unlimited calling (US numbers), unlimited SMS, and "unlimited" data in the US (That is, 1GB of data up to LTE speeds, then unlimited throttled data, but I can never find solid information as to what the speeds are throttled to...)

For your requirement of international communication, you can add a $5/month service which has international SMS

For international calling, I would strongly suggest setting up Skype, Google Voice, WhatApp, or some other VoIP service. These will be much cheaper than any other option and, provided the mobile data works reasonably well from your phone, just as convenient as normal calls.

Unfortunately, the kicker here is your phone supports AT&T's frequencies much better than T-Mobile's (MetroPCS uses T-Mobile's towers). The good news for you is T-Mobile has been expanding into the 1900 MHz band for years in order to make it easy for them to poach AT&T's customers, so they actually have pretty good service on the 1900 MHz band. It's been a long time since I researched it thoroughly, but word on the street (from a T-Mobile employee) is that where there is 1700MHz LTE, there is 1900 MHz 3G. My (T-Mobile) phone supports only 1700MHz LTE, so I can verify that both Salt Lake City and Las Vegas have 1700MHz LTE. Unfortunately, I can't specifically remember if I had coverage on the freeway.

As for a place to buy the SIM card: I assume you are starting in Salt Lake City, since there is no other large airport in Utah. Gateway Mall, on 100 S and 400 W (Fair warning, the locals will refer to such an address as "first south fourth west"). As of last summer, this shop in Gateway Mall was closed for renovations, and I haven't been back since. I would start there but, if they are closed, the Ranchero Mall on 900W and North Temple also has an authorized MetroPCS dealer.

Be careful with both of these shops, because the employee makes a commission off of sales... When we visited the Ranchero Market, my non-native-English-speaker, jet-lagged visitors were fast talked into a far more expensive plan than they needed :).

I can't remember the exact price of a SIM card at the store, but I don't remember it being terrible.

In the US, the only GSM networks (i.e. the only ones that will be compatible with your phone) are AT&T and T-Mobile. However there are a lot of MVNOs that operate on one of these two networks. AT&T has better coverage, and there's an MVNO that uses AT&T's network and offers affordable unlimited data ($40/mo, first 2.5 GB high-speed, pay for more high-speed if desired): Cricket Wireless.

One method that hasn't been mentioned is SIM cards intended for travellers. One major example is ZipSIM which provides prepaid plans from $15 for 500MB of data.

Another is Good2GoMobile / US Travel (warning: their ssl certificate has expired.) They offer a Pay-as-you-go deal, and use the AT&T network. However, you can only buy their SIMs in stores rather than online.

There are numerous others like Roam Mobility, One SIMCard, WorldSIM, Similicious and TravelSIM. They all offer competitive deals which are worth it for short stays. You can find many of them on WillMyPhoneWork to check compatibility, and if they're not on there they're likely to be prepaid cards on major networks.

Disclaimer: I am not linked with any of the above companies. However I am planning to buy a ZipSIM in the future and am wondering if it's worth it.

One provider that hasn't been mentioned yet is FreedomPop. As far as I can tell, they don't have any physical stores, so you would need an address that they can mail you a SIM card to (maybe whatever hotel / friend's house your first stop is at?)

I just plugged in some phony (haha) information to see if it would come up with any options for addresses in downtown Salt Lake City -- it worked and offered their Unlimited Talk/Text + 1GB Data SIM pack on a free one month trial ($20/month thereafter), so it could be completely free.

Disclaimer - I have ordered one of their free SIM packs myself, but I haven't received it yet, so I have no idea what their coverage is like. But for $0, there's really nothing to lose. Maybe check it out as a backup option?