Which SIM card to buy in the USA?

Updated 20/01/2020

When you are abroad do you prefer to buy a local SIM card? Or do you prefer to use your tariff with roaming abroad? Are you about to leave and don’t know what to do? We recommend you which SIM to buy in the USA!

US Companies

Let’s start from the beginning: before leaving for each trip, we always check the offers of the various companies online. Avoid the various virtual operators and look for operator with more coverage, especially if you travel around the country, you need the phone to always be covered. So first let’s see which are the major communication companies in the USA and what they offer for tourists .

Quokka Advice: the most important thing to evaluate (besides the price of course) is the amount of data traffic that the various plans give you, in the end what you will use will be Whatsapp, Facetime, Skype, Uber and the various Social Networks Facebook and Instagram.

AT&T

AT&T does not provide a plan dedicated to tourists, unfortunately, and you have to settle for a Prepaid plan, among those offered normally. You therefore have 3 options to choose from:

1. 65$/month per unlimited Giga
2. 45$/monthper 6GB
3. 35$/month per 1GB

Verizon

Also Verizon does not propose a plan dedicated to tourists and offers only Prepaid plans with these 4 options:

1. 80$/month per unlimited Giga
2. 60$/month per 10GB
3. 50$/month per 7GB
4. 40$/month per 3GB

In addition to these offers (where calls and messages are also included) it is possible to choose plans only for data traffic without time limits:

1. 100$ per 10GB
2. 50$ per 5GB
3. 35$ per 2GB
4. 20$ per 1GB
5. 15$ per 500MB

T-Mobile

T-Mobile finally offers a plan for tourists that, although not cheap, saves something compared to other plans:

• 30$ for 3 weeks 2GB at full speed, once exhausted it continues to navigate but at reduced speed

In addition to this dedicated plan, of course, T-Mobile also offers Prepaid plans like the other companies:

1. 75$/month per unlimited Giga
2. 55$/month 6GB
3. 45$/month 4GB

The best SIM card

For our two-week trip to the US, we have opted for the T-Mobile tourist plan and we also recommend it for the experience. We activated the SIM in 2 minutes as soon as we arrived in Times Square on the first day, we never had any problems with coverage on our journey from the East to the West Coast.

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