In their latest move, Lebara adds China and India to their list of free data roaming regions, in addition to EU.
This is exciting news for someone who visits China, especially regularly. For very well known reasons accessing many Internet services in China can be quite challenging. Of course there’s always VPN, but finding the right one, plus having to enable / disable them on your phone all the time is a nuisance. I’m more than happy to pay a bit more to bypass the firewall directly, and that’s when you use a foreign sim card.
Such service providers have been around for a while. For example CMLink issues sim cards in many countries and their plans include free roaming in China. Their free roaming quota is very poor however and not practical unless you are only visiting for a few days. Lebara on the other hand, has a very generous roaming allowance, up to 30GB per month.
Besides the roaming feature, Lebara has the advantage of offering very cheap rate plans, although I cannot speak of their network coverage and quality of reception. If you are interested, there are quite a few very attractive sign-up deals, for example:
- 1GB – £0.49 per month for 3 months
- 15GB – £1.15 per month for 7 months
- 35GB – £1.99 per month for 7 months
- 50GB – £2.99 per month for 7 months
It will revert to the higher original monthly rate after the promotion period. There’s no contract however and you can cancel anytime.
The China roaming not working. I just back from China and try to use the 2 day ago. There was not data signal and we can see Lebara name. Just the name
I’ve read mixed reports. Coverage is very poor at some places but better elsewhere