Digital Nomad Tech

For many years, traveling abroad meant paying large sums for telephone bills. With WhatsApp and Skype, we seldom have to pay any phone calls anywhere around the world.

However, with the rising scams, most people use a multi factor authentication device, typically tied to your phone number.

Google has a virtual phone number that one could use. If you want to travel, but still continue to do regular work, call clients, receive phone calls on the number your clients know of, get the MFA SMS texts, you either need to pay your carrier a daily fee to use your phone abroad. Some carriers have better plans than others. The AT&T plan charges $10 a day for using your phone anywhere in a supported set of countries.

At the Tokyo airport, I could rent a Wi-Fi device, which allows up to 11 simultaneous connections to it with unlimited data and LTE or 5G access to their network.

This device provided Wi-Fi access everywhere along my route and I could connect my computer as well as phone to it.

To make outbound calls without paying roaming charges, all I needed to do was to turn on Wi-Fi calling on the iPhone. With the Wi-Fi, roaming off, cellular data on, I could get the SMS text messages for multi factor authentication as well.

The device rented for ¥1000 a day with an optional ¥300 a day insurance cost to avoid paying ¥54,000 fee if you lost the device. However, even with this insurance, they wanted a police report if you lost the device.