I’m moving to Japan early September for six months and am part of a Fantasy Football draft back in America; I will have Pocket WiFi but will be traveling that entire weekend when my draft takes place. I’ll be residing in Kyoto and heading to Hiroshima around that time as well. Can I count on my Pocket WiFi to reliably draft for two hours from my iPhone during that time? Just wanted to ask ahead of time how good those are and if it’s worth me renting one over the weekend.
5 comments
No. Mobile signal (which the pocket WiFi use) in Shinkansen can be spotty when in tunnels. And Shinkansen has a lot of tunnels. Free WiFi on the Shinkansen also has the same problem.
At least I am assuming you are taking Shinkansen. Conventional lines usually don’t have the same provlem.
I had Pocket Wi-Fi back in 2012.
I thought it was pretty cool knowing I could access high speed internet anywhere, but my happiness didn’t last long lol.
At the beginning it was ok. Could download stuff at 10/MB per sec, which is pretty fast. But once you hit a certain data usage they will throttle it so much that YouTube will start to buffer.
Only kept it for a year then cancelled. Paid 18,800 in penalty and moved on lol.
It’s only good for doing light stuff like browsing the web, emails, texting, and stuff like that. Streaming with that is a big no.
I did my fantasy football draft from my pocket wifi from a ship 10+ miles from land while on a discord call. Definitely wasn’t perfect but I didn’t miss any picks.
I found it pretty good as a tourist, it works for browsing and is relatively consistent but I never did any downloading or needed to stream anything at very specific times. It can vary a lot but overall is worth it if you’re a tourist.
Personally if you’re there for six months and are looking to do these very specific time-sensitive tasks I’d look into getting a data-only sim. I found the coverage form the sims way better than from pocket wifi. There’s companies that are set up to cater for foreigners looking to pay monthly for a sim, some may require a yearly contract though so that’s something to investigate.
Though of course with the traveling nothing can really be guaranteed, but I imagine you could patch something together with the free transport wifi and a mobile sim.
I got an AirBnB for my parents in Kyoto. Pocket Wifi came with the place. We only used it in the apartment, and seem ok. I also traveled all over Japan with a data sim card for my iPhone and never had a problem with signal.