The BEST SIM Card/VPN when traveling to China

Background: I am Chinese but I study in Canada, I started my education in Canada when I was 14 years old. So basically, I can't live without FANNG. This March break, I came back to China to see my parents. But how do I use services that have been banned by the Chinese government? The answer is VPN+SIM Card. I will explain why do I use this combo when I am in China.

First, SIM Card, Introducing, getnomad.app

The reason why I use an oversea SIM Card is because it gives me unrestricted access to services that are banned in China. You might wanna ask, why do you need it if you have a VPN? The answer is simple, VPNs are basically illegal in China, and when you use them, you might have all kinds of issues, sometimes their server is down, sometimes (some VPN providers) they just take your money and run away, sometimes the owner of the VPN gets arrested. There are a ton of reasons why you do not want to ONLY rely on VPNs. But for me, there's another reason, when you use VPN on your mobile, it will drain your battery more quickly as it needs to route all of your traffic(and listen to those traffic). Imagine you are on a nice Chinese tour, you wouldn't want to connect your battery charger to your phone the whole time, right?

That's why using a SIM Card that gives you unrestricted Internet access is better. You might ask again, Why nomad.app? First, I would like to make it clear that there is no way that I am affiliated with getnomad.app. The reason why I recommend them here is because I am using them right now, and their service has no problems so far. Also, their plans are cheaper than other providers. My plan is 60G data for 60 days for 51 USD. Maybe this is too much for you, no worries, they have cheaper plans in their shop. Their plan starts at $4. (Even tho I don't think that's enough unless you are into your 80s)

I am using their service with my Pixel8, which supports eSIM. To check if your device supports eSIM, please visit this page. But keep in mind for some countries, like China, even tho your device might shown as supported on their website, since it's a Chinese version, they have a high chance that they still do not support eSIM.

Now I can dive deeper for you if you are interested in more details. They use China Unicom's network, which is great in northern China but might lack coverage in rural villages in Southern China (You will be fine in any big cities). They advertise it as a 5G SIM Card but I think it has limited 5G coverage since I was a China Unicom user, I knew I could get 5G signals in my home but in reality, this card only has LTE signals in my home. So I doubt it has the same 5G coverage as a normal China Unicom SIM Card. Probably in some big cities like Shanghai, you will have 5G signals, but since I live in a relatively small city in China, I cannot confirm that.

When you use it, your whole network will be in a Hong Kong environment (no Chinese IP for you at all!), I assume they have some kind of agreement with the ISP(and the government) so they can legally tunnel all of your traffic to their HK server. If you are curious, their network in Hong Kong is ASLINE LIMITED(AS18013). And their IP type is "hosting". Which further confirms my suspicion. This means it's not an ISP IP and you might encounter more strict security measures from some services. And according to scamalytics, it even states this is an "Anonymizing VPN" IP.

As for the speed, you will get a constant 25mbps download and 2mbps upload. I am pretty sure they have limited the speed. To save your data, or their money? Who knows? That means it doesn't even matter if you can connect to 5G or not AT ALL. There is no way you can achieve 5G speed on this SIM Card. But this speed is enough for almost every application you need. Streaming YouTube at 1080P will have NO problems. Nomrally you only need 10mbps max for a 1080P video. Unless you decide to pull out a gaming laptop and start to download games, which I don't know why would you do that on a trip like this... And the good thing is, since the server is in Hong Kong you will have relatively low latency compared to connecting to a server in US or something like that.

So don't worry about the speed, you will be fine. Most other providers who say unlimited data often cap your speed after 1-2GB of high-speed data usage. Normally they will reduce the speed to 128kbps. 25mbps is 3125kbps... Which means it's 24.4 times slower than 25mbps. At that rate I would guess you gonna have a little bit of a problem using your Google Maps. And I don't think you wanna open YouTube at that speed. I tried, I wanted to kill myself. I think Google Fi's speed is higher than 25mbps at midnight-early morning, but their speed will be reduced to around 10 mbps at peak time(late afternoon-evening). At least when I was using Google Fi in my city that's what I've got.

Lastly, I would like to say if you are generous enough you can use my code AA20NFEPso you will get $3 off on your first purchase and I will get $3 credits. And if you think nomad.app's plans don't fit you well, you can try mobimatter.com, they are a little cheaper in some ways, but I can't say anything about them because I have never used their services.