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Best ideas for internet access in Tuscany area, Italy

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We are a family group, 6 adults and 6 kids, staying at one Air B&B for a full month just outside of Cortona, Italy. There will also be a few day trips in Italy and some of us will have an overnight trip to France included in this adventure. The group will not always be traveling together.

We are trying to figure out the best way for all of us to have decent internet access for various uses. We currently all have Verizon wireless service.

Do we:

1) Order the monthly Verizon travel plan individually and use our phones as hotspots, or…

2) Rent a WiFi hotspot unit that can be shared (but only when we are all together), or…

3) Purchase one of the above hotspots

Thought and other ideas? What has worked best for you?

Posted by
9261 posts

Everyone install WhatsApp on their phones.

I’m in LA, I text friends in London nearly everyday via WhatsApp.

Posted by
16133 posts

Verizon and AT&T both charge $10/day for their travel pass to use the phone while abroad. T-Mobile includes unlimited data and texting while abroad. Guess what I switch to some years ago.

While in a hotel you can use their wifi, but if you need wifi while on the go using cellular data, you either buy a local SIM card at a Vodafone or TIM or Wind3 or Fastweb stores (just to name the main companies in Italy) and pay about €20 for a month, or rely on your US based service provider, which can be expensive (AT&T or Verizon) or at no extra cost (TMobile). Once you have data, you can all use WhatsApp or, if you have TMobile also regular texting since they include that for free while abroad.

Posted by
28247 posts

If your phones accept eSIMs, you can just download those and not have to deal with changing the physical SIMs. To use any sort of new SIM/eSIM the phone must be unlocked.

There are eSIMs that will work in both Italy and France as well as single-country eSIMs. I used eSIMs for Poland and Turkey earlier this year. I knew I'd need to make few calls and they'd be reasonably priced with my current phone plan, so I simply purchased eSIMs that provided cellular data. I purchased those from Airalo, whose software-installation instructions were easy to follos. I continued texting (without charge) via my regular Google Fi service; I had to Google to figure out to make that work after installing the first eSIM, but it was simple enough.

Posted by
4871 posts

Or rent a mobile hotspot it's about the size of a hockey puck

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