Talk:Greece/@comment-27968765-20160726214454

Just got back from 2 weeks in Greece. After arriving in Athens, my hotel in the center got pretty poor speeds while roaming on US T-Mobile iPhone 6S Plus. It showed 4 or 5 bars of Cosmote but the initial speed tests were very poor. (US T-Mobile is running an unlimited international data roaming in Europe for the months of July and August.)

So I went to Syntagma square, intending to buy a prepaid SIM at the Cosmote store but they were out of them.

Back at the hotel that night, I switched to Vodafone GR and got 15-20 Mbps down and 2-3 Mbps up. However, when tethering other devices to the iPhone, the speeds were only 2/2.

I even tweeted T-Mobile US about this and made several DM exchanges. Then the next morning, I switched back to Cosmote and ran the speed tests again. Much better, 24/14! Tethering worked well too.

During this trip I stayed in Mykonos, Santorini and Crete. In most cases, I was near the biggest city on the islands. I would have to switch it back and forth depending on the city/island. In the city centers, Cosmote was fine, especially if I set it to Automatically select the carrier. But sometimes depending on the hotel, I would get better results on Vodafone by switching to it manually. I  tried Wind a couple of times and it never got a signal in these good-sized cities which were full of tourists.

Even got okay coverage when I took the boat from Mykonos to Santorini. Had coverage most of the time. Not fast as in the cities but good enough for checking Google Maps, emails.

The odd thing is the variability of the performance. The experience of Athens where it improved a lot from one day to the next happened on Chania as well. I guess once I started getting pretty good speeds, I didn't have any interest in buying a SIM but it could be that roaming through US T-Mobile, which routes traffic back to the US, is not representative of the performance of these carriers.

In any event, I got pretty good use out of this roaming promotion, downloading a few gigs of data, streaming a couple of times, as well as having connectivity all the time. In some spots, the speeds were very good. NOt the fastest but plenty good for mobile devices.