From the Editor’s Desk: Can You Hear Me Now? (Premium)

We’ve traveled internationally for decades, mostly to Europe, but semi-exclusively to Mexico City for the past three years. There are so many ways by which those experiences can be cataloged, but one of the more interesting—to me, at least—is using the technological advances that have occurred during this time. And none have had a more profound effect, to date, than phones.

That sounds obvious. But I’m old enough to remember waiting until the weekend to make long-distance phone calls. Forced to use the car phone in my boss’s truck in 1985, I was admonished because just picking up the handset triggered an expensive charge. And I recall driving to work in the early 1990s behind what appeared to be a drunk driver, only to pull up next to the vehicle and see that the driver was talking on a cell phone, swerving all over the road in a way that would become common decades later. He was probably a doctor. Few others could afford such a thing then.

My wife and I first visited Europe in the early 1990s, twice, thanks to my father, who lived in London for several years and paid for the trips. On the second of these trips, we also visited Paris and Ireland on separate side trips with my youngest sister. We booked the hotel in Paris using the fax machine at my father’s office. And on the trip to Ireland, we booked our first bed and breakfast—the 20th-century version of an Airbnb—using a pay phone overlooking Dublin Bay.

By the time we returned to Europe in 2003, a work trip to Germany that my wife and I turned into a longer stay, we had young kids and were living outside of Boston near the rest of our families. Before the trip, we rented a Nokia cell phone so that we could stay in contact with our kids, who were staying with Stephanie’s parents. To make that happen, we had to drive into East Boston, and we used a Mapquest printout to find the place. But I will never forget the miracle of us speeding down the Autobahn in Germany while I spoke to our son Mark, who is deaf, using this tiny phone. Technology often fails me. But every once in a while you’re reminded of how and why it can be life-changing in a good way too.

That trip to Germany spawned over 15 years of regular travel to Europe, for home swaps and otherwise. And phones became an ever-bigger part of those trips. We bought our own little Nokia phone, figuring it would be cheaper to own one than rent them every time we traveled. And then we didn’t really need it anyway because phones advanced so quickly: In 2007, the iPhone arrived, and I brought it to Paris that summer during our second home swap, scared to death to even turn it on because reports of early iPhone users returning home from Europe with foot-high paper bills and several thousand dollars in charges were already common. The issue was that the iPhone had no sense of roaming let alone international usage, and aside from using the then-new free Wi-Fi that the city had begun supplying, I kept the iPhone locked down.

More trips, more phones, more advances, more adventures. My iPhone 3GS was stolen by a Romani thief in Lisbon in 2009. The quality of the photos I could take with the Nokia Lumia 1020 was so good that I experimented using that as my only camera during a home swap in Amsterdam in 2013 and then switched completely, and never used a standalone camera again. Connectivity quality exploded in the march to 3G, 4G, and then 5G, and it conversely got a lot less expensive. Where I would pay AT&T hundreds of dollars for 800 MB of international access in the late 2000s, and just the one time with no further upgrades, the cost dropped dramatically and then the restrictions eased up. We went from using international SIM cards—which got physically smaller and smaller over time—to just using our regular cell phone plans. First intermittently. And then without restrictions.

Google Fi—originally called Project Fi—played a big role in this transition. In the early days, I would just activate my Fi plan when I traveled internationally. And back then there was only a single (physical) SIM card slot in the phones, so that meant I’d either not have access to my normal phone and text messages, or I’d have to bring two phones. In one notable event in November 2016, I was prepping for a work trip to Haarlem, The Netherlands the night before the flight, had removed my AT&T SIM card, and fumble-fingered the Fi SIM: It flew up in the air, landed between the couch cushions, and evaded my every attempt to retrieve it, finally falling inside the couch. When my wife and daughter walked in the door from whatever errands they were on, they were surprised to see me literally sawing into the wood bottom of the couch, now splayed upside down on the living room floor, like a crazed lumberjack. Yes, we retrieved the SIM card, and, yes, I did use it in The Netherlands without issue.

In time, phones adapted to offer two SIM cards, which is huge for travelers like me. And then to the mix of physical and eSIM capabilities that is still common today. When Apple released its eSIM-only iPhones in late 2022, it was too soon, at least for Mexico, since eSIMs were then unheard of here. But that’s passed: We can get eSIMs at the local Telcel now, something that wasn’t possible as recently as last year.

The move to eSIMs has also improved things in other ways: You can very easily add, remove, and move eSIMs, and because there are plenty of third-party services, competition is helping to lower the cost. In the same way that I transitioned from physical media to digital music, videos, and video games, I am all-in on eSIM now. It’s so much better.

Thanks to all of these innovations, everything just works now. I’ve used my normal T-Mobile and now Google Fi (again) cell phone plans in Mexico as I’ve done at home, and my wife does the same with her Verizon-based phone, with no additional charges or worries. Our kids will visit this coming week and will have the same experience. It’s so seamless, so normal. It’s exactly what I predicted to my wife in the late 2000s, when we still struggled with connectivity and the cost of that connectivity. The only difference is that I thought we’d end up in Europe, not Mexico City. But that’s a different story. The point is that these technological advances would make something that was difficult and expensive something that would be seamless and inexpensive. And they did.

But the problem with things just working, of course, is that they don’t always. And it is an astonishing example of the human condition that we can get so entitled, so quickly, despite the decades of experiences that came before. More specifically, we’ve been out in the city here, walking around, eating and drinking, and visiting with friends, and every once in a while—not daily, but maybe several times during this trip—my phone connectivity has just dropped off the face of the earth. I have not reacted well when this happens. I’m not a fan of things not working.

Me being me, I’ve troubleshooted the issue. After all, I did just recently switch back to Google Fi, and then I did just switch, temporarily, from my Pixel 8 Pro to a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra so I can review it. Maybe it was me. Or the phone. Or something.

Or maybe it was the network I was connecting to. In side-by-side tests, my wife’s phone routinely sees better connectivity and much faster download speeds. And while it’s hard to tell on the Samsung, it appears that I’ve been connecting to the Moviestar and Telmex networks locally while Steph’s phone is connecting to Telcel. And Google Fi doesn’t work with Telcel.

We have a local phone number—with an eSIM, from Telcel—but I’ve also experimented with some third-party data-only eSIM services. I previously mentioned Nomad eSIM and the successes I had using this service on our last trip. (And, please, do use my promo code PAUL65GE if you end up trying Nomad yourself.) On this trip, I’ve used a Nomad eSIM with one phone and an Airlo eSIM with another. Airlo can be a bit more expensive here, barring a sale, but I’ve seen even better connectivity, and higher download speeds, using this service. Because it connects to Telcel, of course. (Yes, I have a referral code there, too: PAUL5847.)

Whatever. This isn’t just a solvable problem, it’s a problem that’s already been solved. We have so many choices now, and we’re no longer beholden to a single connectivity choice. If my carrier doesn’t work well enough, I can just use something else. We live in an incredible age.

And it’s about to get even better, thanks to AI.

We’ve been using Google Translate for so long I can’t even remember, but phones have or will soon have instant live translations in two directions, one of several AI features that Samsung promotes for the S24 Ultra I’m now testing. The goal, of course, is for us to know enough Spanish that we don’t need such a thing. But … we have needed such a thing.

In one case, we were careening toward the canals of Xochimilco in an Uber, and the driver was offering something that our iffy Spanish couldn’t quite get around. But using Google Translate, we discovered that he would wait for us there and then drive us back if we just paid him directly. There was no extra cost to us, but he would just get all the money instead of us paying Uber. So we did that, and it worked out great. More recently, we’ve used this functionality to communicate with a technician who has to come to our apartment to fix the water heater.

It’s not difficult to see where this is going: We’ll soon have the equivalent of the Babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, first on our phones, then in our earbuds, and then, no doubt, embedded in our ears. And we will look back on these early days of smartphone apps and services and think, how quaint, as we now do when remembering early car phones and cell phones. But this capability will bring together people in magical ways, even when those people don’t speak the same languages.

What a world.