I had zero trouble getting a SIM with China Mobile. I pre-paid $1/RMB per day plus a deposit in case I went over my daily usage. It took a bit of time that day because of language issues but I was fine.
"Tried to do the same in a tourist city (not a tier 1 city), beginning of May, didn't work."
I'm curious - did you go to an official China Unicom store (i.e. owned and operated by China Unicom) or an independent retailer that happens to sell SIM cards?
"I wanted a full SIM, not a data only SIM though, which one did you get?"
The problem generally isn't the SIM itself - it's the form factor. Granted I haven't traveled to China in two years now, but MicroSIM form factor was nonexistent there on my last trip. Many vendors used cheap, shitty handheld punches to get the excess plastic off of normal SIM cards to get them into SIM form factor. This worked about one time out of five - most of the time it just destroyed the SIM card.
I believe so. When I was in China, my mainland SIM didn't work at all in HK. I assume many people get prepaid SIMs when traveling out of China so they wouldn't be subject to filtering anyway.
I’m quite concerned about the fact that only China will be getting nano-SIM and every other territory will have e-SIM only. On a recent trip from the UK to South Korea and Japan (where my network has very high roaming prices), it was relatively easy to pick up SIM cards from vending machines and desks at airports. I don’t imagine it’ll be as easy to negotiate and activate an e-sim connection.
I bought a dual sim Mi phone for this purpose as well. It worked out really well. At the border crossing from Hong Kong into mainland china, they didn't seem interested in my devices fortunately. Still will wipe my phone before I use it again, however.
When I was in Thailand, one carrier had the ability to co-opt my China unicom SIM and provide service there. I don't think my SIM was a soft one, I think they were actually co-opting the numbers!
I'm currently using Viettel. At least in their main shop here in Nha Trang the staff spoke good enough English that they were able to understand what I wanted. Just tell them you want the 3g plan with the monthly fee.
You may have to go into an actual shop to get this set up. The people selling sims on the side of the road aren't very tech savvy in my experience.
> Also, most interesting phone models do not have a dual-SIM option.
This is the strangest thing. In China, phones are overwhelmingly dual-SIM, and it's actually more difficult to find single-SIM phones (even clones of major-brand devices like iPhones will have dual-SIM); the production cost of adding a 2nd SIM socket is negligible.
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