eduroam – Tech Stuff

12 September 2026

Roaming in Sweden

I usually blog about my roaming experiences when I travel abroad. Sometimes I have issues, but more recently things have gone very smoothly. This year I did personal day trips to Venice, Madrid and Copenhagen. My roaming experience in these three cities was all fine, so much so, I forgot to blog about them.

This week I was on an extended visit to Sweden. I was planning to be there from Sunday to Tuesday in Luleå, but because of the Nats issue at Heathrow, my connecting flight from Stockholm was cancelled. The earliest flight I could then be booked onto was three days later. I then spent three days in Stockholm.

This was the first international trip I had taken with my new iPhone 17 Pro Max and the roaming experience was seamless.

Before when I would go abroad the process I would use with my phone, was to go into Settings -> Mobile Data and turn off virtually all the apps which could use mobile data. I would turn off mobile data for virtually all my apps and also specifically iCloud Drive and iCloud Backup. I am pretty sure they were the culprits for my excessive data usage whilst in Portugal. This time, as with my recent trip to Netherlands, I only turned off mobile data for iCloud Drive and iCloud Backup.

However with my extended trip I did use 7GB of my fair use limit of 12GB. This is even with decent hotel wifi, and eduroam at my conference venue and in the Swedish airports.

10 September 2026

Eduroam at the Airport

I had read about how at Swedish airports you could connect to eduroam. I have never been to Sweden before so could never test that out. However, I recently flew from London Heathrow to Luleå in northern Sweden, with a transfer at Stockholm.

At both Stockholm Airport and Luleå Airport I was able to easily connect to eduroam and the speeds were impressive. On the test I did, I was able to get 300Mb/s down and 260Mb/s up speeds.

Of course adding eduroam to places like airports is not a technical problem, but a political one. It probably helped that Swedavia is the state-owned company that owns and operates Sweden’s major airports.

27 September 2025

Roaming in the Netherlands

I usually blog about my roaming experiences when I travel abroad. Sometimes I have issues, but more recently things have gone very smoothly.

I had visited Amsterdam nearly two years ago, back in October 2023, then I had no issues with roaming. I was visiting the Netherlands again, though this time I was attending a conference in Delft.

When I go abroad the process I use is go into Settings -> Mobile Data and turn off virtually all the apps which could use mobile data. I would turn off mobile data for virtually all my apps and also specifically iCloud Drive and iCloud Backup. I am pretty sure they were the culprits for my excessive data usage whilst in Portugal. This time, as with my recent trip to France, I only turned off mobile data for iCloud Drive and iCloud Backup and a few data heavy apps.

The hotel I was staying at had good wifi, and the conference venue at TU Delft had eduroam. Having said that I did make use of mobile data when I was in coffee shops, on the train, and walking around various Dutch places. I was impressed with the mobile data speeds that were available.

I was there for five days and when I landed back in Bristol, I had not used up all my data.

29 March 2016

Reducing Roaming Costs

Last week I was in Dublin for the LILAC 16 conference. The last time I was in Ireland was in 2012. Back then I was on an EE contract and when I arrived at Dublin Airport I tuned flight mode on, on my iPhone as I didn’t want to incur huge roaming charges. There was quite a few press stories (and still are now and again) on people taking their smartphones abroad and racking up huge charges in their phones because of the way modern phones use data. I spent the week using wifi and making the odd call home when needed.

Since then there has been new EU legislation on roaming charges. I also have moved away from EE and have a new contract with Three using an iPhone 6S Plus. The contract gives me unlimited data on the phone as well as unlimited texts and a generous number of minutes, well who uses their phones for making calls these days?

So before this visit to Dublin I checked the Three website and was pleasantly surprised to find out that I could use my phone abroad with no extra costs!

Though I have an unlimited plan, there are some restrictions when using my plan abroad.

If you have all-you-can-eat data you can use up to 12GB. If you have all-you-can-eat texts you can send up to 5,000 texts.

So during my visit I was able to easily join the Three Ireland network, make calls, send texts and use data with no problems or worries. Though it has to be said the UCD eduroam wifi network was excellent and faster than the Three 3G network, whilst the 3G was faster and more reliable than the hotel network. As I was there only three days, the 12GB allowance was more than enough.

After I got back I got a text from Three. According to them I saved £56.36 which was nice.