Hi! First of all, thanks Daley for your guides. They're very helpful.
For several years, I've been travelling the globe a bit. I do not spend more than a couple of weeks per year in the US. I would like to have a permanent US cell phone number and the ability to use data (mostly for whatsapp, email and google maps) while I'm in the US. In the past, I bought burners at the airport, after listening to young persons telling me stuff that I did not understand. The American telecommunication lingo is still a bit of a mystery to me. Words have different meanings than what I'm used to and the pricing structure is quite alien to me.
I currently have several smartphones with pre-paid sim cards from different countries (and from different carriers) in them. As long as I recharge them (online or with a scratch card bought in bulk in a local store) every so often with as little as $5 per 2 months or EUR10 per year, I don't lose my credit and get to keep the same telephone number. When I go to another country, the smartphone with that country's sim card in it becomes my primary phone for local contacts. I turn on data for a week or month and use that phone as a wifi hotspot to give my other phones data through wifi.
When at home, all my phones with foreign sim-cards are connected to the internet in my home, so they can receive whatsapp messages. Some are on all the time, some only for an hour each morning (thanks to scheduled power on and off), and I check them every morning.
My business cards have my primary cell phone number (from where I live) on it. When abroad, I just write my local cell phone number on the back.
Getting a similar setup with an American carrier is a challenge. After a lot of online research and calling helpdesks from some big US carriers, the best they can do is get me a plan in which I'm charged a fee every month to buy credit, which I will subsequently lose if I don't use it in that month. That's not acceptable to me. My current setup costs me about $25 per month (not including data) for 4 phone numbers.
Today, I found "Airvoice Wireless pay-as-you-go" (
https://www.airvoicewireless.com/pay-as-you-go) through one of Daley's posts here or on his own website. This looks quite similar to what I'm used to. My idea is to buy $100 of credit (which is valid for a full year) and when I cross the US border, turn on the data at their insane rate of $0.0666/MB.
What do you all think? Will this work in my situation?