We have a Nighthawk M6 that we got on an mobile broadband plan while travelling around our home country (Australia). We’ve just cancelled that plan, as we are about to head off indefinitely overseas, but have to pay out the device still.

Wondering whether it’s worth keeping and bringing with us to put local data sims in?

Or sell it (recoup cost) and use something else? Like a cheaper travel router.

Or nothing else & just use our phones and whatever wifi we get where stay?

We are two adults and two kids with a decent amount of devices between us, so just hotspotting to a phone is not really a good solution long term. But also we are likely to frequently stay in accommodation with wifi too.

And though our work needs internet, it’s our own business, we can be flexible about when we use wifi, and rarely if ever have to do video calls at set times or anything.

I find it hard to get my head around the options, so any tips in super simple terms very much appreciated.

Thank you!

  • trabulium@alien.top
    BEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’m an Aussie and as long as it’s not locked to Telstra or something, I would probably take it. There’s times, like if you’re short term in a hotel or something where they only allow limited devices via their shitty proxy logins. For example, in Thailand, I could get by with a decent phone plan for 95% of my internet usage and would often Tether a few devices and my son’s tablet / computer but if you have a lot of devices I could see this chewing through the battery. Additionally, there’s some places where internet is shit (Phillipines) and having a backup option available is worth it. BTW, sounds like the perfect nomad business. Can I ask what you do? Feel free to PM if you’re not comfortable sharing.

    • spicybraincells@alien.topOPBEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks. Yeah it’s not locked. So sounds like it will be worth taking. Before we had this in Australia, we were using phone hotspotting a lot and it just drains the phone battery and makes it overheat, so we don’t want to do that again! Plus some of the eSIM options I’ve been researching don’t allow phone hotspotting anyway.

      We do a few things, to create “passive” recurring income - I’m a graphic designer & sell branding, printables, templates etc on Etsy, plus my own courses for other entrepreneurs. And my partner and I created a Yoga app. Though it’s only “passive” because the money is not directly tied to hours worked. We still work on it regularly - but it IS very flexible, and our schedule is totally up to us, which is great. It’s taken us a few years to grow it to the point where it can start to support us though! My partner worked as a software developer in a remote job until recently.

      We probably could have grown it faster, but between having young kids and not really being that great at marketing, it’s been much slower than it could have been!