Guides / 7 min read
A connectivity setup that survives long-stay travel
Working from another country is mostly fine until the day it is not, and the day it is not is always the day of an important call. The failure is rarely the mobile network. It is the apartment router, the coworking space with a hundred people on one uplink, or the cafe that blocks VPNs.
The fix is redundancy, arranged so that the backup is genuinely independent of the thing it is backing up.
Treat mobile data as the backup, not the extra
Fixed connections fail in ways you cannot influence: a building outage, a landlord who has not paid, a router nobody has rebooted since 2019. A mobile connection fails differently and rarely at the same moment, which is the whole point of a second path.
This only works if the backup is ready before you need it. A profile installed and tested on arrival is a backup. A plan to buy something if things go wrong is not.
Why local SIMs are awkward for long stays
The good long-stay tariffs are usually postpaid, and postpaid usually requires residency, a local bank account or a tax number. Prepaid alternatives exist but frequently demand registration against a local address, which a short-term rental may not satisfy.
Then there is the churn. Three months in Lisbon followed by three in Mexico City means starting over, with new paperwork, a new number and new credit that will expire before you return.
- One balance across countries removes the per-country setup
- No local address or tax number needed
- Credit carries over between stays instead of expiring
- Hotspot covers the laptop without a separate device plan
Budgeting data honestly
A working day of email, messaging, documents and browsing is typically under a gigabyte. Video calls are the expensive part, at roughly a gigabyte an hour with camera on, and screen sharing adds to that.
If mobile is a true backup used a few days a month, ten gigabytes is generous. If it is the primary connection because the apartment wifi is hopeless, forty to seventy is realistic, and at that point the arithmetic of per-gigabyte pricing deserves a check against a local option.
The rest of the setup
Keep the recovery token in a password manager that syncs, not only on the phone you carry, because the phone is the thing most likely to be lost or stolen. Enable auto refill at a low threshold so the backup cannot fail for the boring reason of an empty balance.
Carry a small hotspot if you work from a laptop most days. Tethering from a phone works, but it drains the phone and stops when a call comes in, which is the worst possible moment for it to stop.