As it says, we are off on a road trip, some campsites have wifi, some don’t. I need to be able to pick up emails and occasionally send documents while we are away. Anyone got knowledge of/ recommendations for dongles?

bookmarking for later. Hope you get some answers. I’m going to france for 3 weeks in summer and was going to research getting a french payg sim for my nexus 4, then make it a hotspot so we can work the tablet.

Just use your phone?

On the O2 Travel plan – 15MB of data (plenty for picking up emails) costs £1.99 a day.
https://www.o2.co.uk/shop/international/using-phone-in-europe

Just buy a French PAYG SIM off Ebay, you’ll get Gb for a £15 rather than 15Mb!

some campsites have wifi

I had this the year before last. What it tended to mean was that there was WiFi by the campsite owner’s house near the entrance, but not throughout the site. 😡

For the last few years, I’ve tended to use Vodafone’s Eurotraveller add on which gave me 25mb a day – which was enough for general arsing around, but not enough for say, using Google Maps for navigation. Worked fine.

If you’re going to “just use your phone”, check that whatever plan you’re using will allow you to tether (and that your phone has tethering obvs).

If it’s just emails and a few documents just go to a library. It’s free to use, take your passport, they do speak English in most libraries (even in the country).
That’s how I did it.
Turn off the data roaming on you phone or you will be tempted and you’ll get a lovely bill when you get home.

Just buy a French PAYG SIM off Ebay, you’ll get Gb for a £15 rather than 15Mb!

True but that means changing numbers and it could actually work out more expensive than the O2 plan, depending on how long he is away and how often he doesn’t need data cos he has wifi.

Turn off the data roaming on you phone or you will be tempted and you’ll get a lovely bill when you get home.

Which is the other good thing about the O2 one: you can’t exceed the £1.99 a day unless you text them for more data – so no unexpected huge bill.

I find 15Mb is nothing and go through it every day.

French data rates are: 5 euros for 7 days (150mb) or 10 euros for 2 weeks (500mb), but you need a French SIM card first.

I’ve also found that free wifi was available more than here. Germany on the other hand is very stingy with it. Either cafés/bars don’t have it or want to charge you for it.

Interesitingly, Three have a kinda random list of countries on their Feel At Home allowance where you’re just using your home allowance with no other charges. Annoyingly, the two European countries I’m most likely to visit, Germany and France aren’t on that list. Bah.

If you don’t want to use a library you could always use MacDonalds. Free wifi there too.

We’ve been using data in France through various means for years.

Initially we would buy an O2 data SIM, 50Mb for £200 (that was 7 years ago! ), then we started just using roaming data, but that could be quite expensive. Vodafone (and O2) have their equivalent EUro passes where you pay £2-3 a day to access your domestic bundles & tariffs.

When we go for longer spells though, we find one of these invaluable:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/310885239163?

There’s loads around, various models, but a basic 3G Huwawei will do. Get an unlocked one – settings are accessed via an IP address once connected, then you just need the APN settings of whichever French SIM provider you end up buying, and then turn your phone to Data Roaming OFF, and use Wifi for data on your phone or laptop using the MiFi dongle.