SIM Cards

Ciao!

I am writing this as my first week in Florence comes to an end. I wanted to share some advice for preparing for a study abroad in Florence. Between packing, visas, credit cards, phone plans, and everything in between, I found it very stressful to navigate this! Hopefully this post will help take a load off your mind.

Extending your plan:

One of my friends are with T-mobile and opted to extend their plan to get coverage here. It costs 50 additonal USD. The pro: you get to keep you number and immediately get data coverage the second you land. I think it also works anywhere in Europe. I believe my friend has limited high speed data, however-- something between 5-20 gigs.

From the second she landed, she was having issues. I have this issue too when im travelling with T-mobile where the service just doesn't work sometimes, for a couple hours or days. Resetting your phone can remediate this issue every once in a while but it doesn't always work. Her connection has been very bad here. The speeds are very slow, and she often only has a few bars of LTE.

I think it is because they are basically a middleman provider and so you have lower priority than the local carriers customers. I don't fully understand why its so bad, but it is seriously super disappointing especially for an additional 50 USD on top of your regular phone bill. I'm not sure what it's like for other providers, but its something to keep in mind

Buy a local E-sim:

I personally think this is the best option. Buy from a local provider such as Windtre, TIM, or Vodaphone. You can just walk into a store that sells them (I think all Tabaccharias have them), and pick one up for less than 10 euros a month for insane amounts of data, like 100+ in Italy and the ability to use 15 in the EU. What I ended up doing was buying one from Lycamobile. I decided to do this because I didn't want to go shopping around at physical stores and was feeling lazy lol. The plan has been pretty good, as it costs 7.99EUR/ month for the esim. I get 120 gigs of 5G data and can use 12 or 15 in the rest of the EU. It also is affordable enough that you can keep your own phone plan, so you can keep your number for all those MFA texts you get and have the convenience of still being reached at your own number.

One thing you will have to do, though, is make sure your carrier supports adding an esim and supports the specific carrier as well. some carriers have restrictions on who you can do business with. T-mobile doesn't have any restrictions, but you will have to call them to unlock your phone, which I think you have to do with pretty much any provider.

The TIM offer at Ldm: at one of your orientations, they will introduce a special student offer. I think it is kind of a scam because the activation is super expensive ( I didnt pay any activation fee with Lyca). Here's the flyer. I misread it and thought the esim was only 10 dollars for the first month, but it is actually 10+20, so 30 euros, which I found really steep. It then only costs 10.99 for subsequent months which isn't terrible, but when i compare it to my plan, it. is kind of crimial to pay 52 dollars for 3 months for this plan when Lyca offers a similar one for $24 a month. I can buy 7 cups of gelato with that money.

OK also, the E-sims on sites like amazon are also a scam! they have pretty bad coverage compared to the local carriers and they cost so much money! I seriously would not pay more than 10 Euro for any phone plan here in Italy. There is literally no reason to.

I hope this helps you get started. I would recommend doing a quick as with Chat GPT depending on what your needs are to find something that works for you