TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums British Virgin Islands WiFi provider

I know this is a "dead horse" question and has been asked many times before but I have not had much luck on the "search" option here (not a complaint, I love Traveltalk!!), so help me if you can....
I've used the Lime WiFi before, I know it's gone...what should I use, provider and unit for my boat.....we are on a 44' monohull and would like a five or six user system friendly to the BVI...doesn't have to be lightening fast just get the job done any advice would be appreciated...thanks in advance...Capt. Jim

Last December i went in to Digicel, bought a mobile wifi hi spot for $80, and 7 Gigs of data for another $80. Worked great but then on the fourth day we went from 4 gigs remaining to zero.
Not sure if someone left an app running overnight or not. No one thinks they did.
Note, Digicel is not open
Sundays and techs not around on Saturday.
My plan this year is to use the same device and top up the data.
We shall see.
The hotspot I brought from home that was supposed to be unlocked and work anywhere in the world did not work in the BVIs.

We have a Verizon Jetpack 4G LTE Mobile Hotspot - AC791L in our motorhome, attached to an Antennas Plus Double Cell LTE antenna (built in ground plane). That device is on our Verizon unlimited data plan. We added international service for just that device for our charter last month, and brought the device and antenna down with us. It hooked up through Digicel. Multiple users. Not fast, but was serviceable everywhere there was a Digicel tower.

Not sure who your cell phone provider is but I had good luck last week simply using the $10 per day international data access plan on my cell phone. Speeds were faster than the digicel mifi device that the charter company includes on our boat and I was even able to setup a personal hot spot that I used on my laptop. Our cell phones are on AT&T but I think other providers offer this option as well.

ATT, Sprint, TMobil, and even Verizon have very good international roaming and tethering packages. Set it up ahead of time and don't waste precious vacation time dealing with this.

I'm leaving in 6 days. I chose a 30 day plan with ATT. Unlimited texting $.50 per minute calls and 300 mgb of data. With all of the free wifi spots around the island I can plan for usage. Everyone knows to text me and I can send pictures etc...

You can also do the 10 dollar a day ATT plan with unlimited data and make your phone a hotspot for everyone else. ATT had great data coverage. They only charge you the 10 on the days you use it. You will be in network off the ATT USVI towers about half the trip. Cost 40 bucks last trip and we had wifi and data all week for everyone. Cheapest option!

We are down for almost a month. I am without major responsibilities now that I am retired and have only my elderly Mom to worry about. I try to unconnected as much as possible. It's easy to get my fix at the places that have free wifi or as you said at the spots that have ATT coverage. With unlimited texting I can keep in touch with those I need to and get a break from the rest!!

Headed to ATT this morning to get set up...thanks....See you soon!

You can also do it online.

On our last trip, not everyone could do the Verizon $10/day thing so we got the mifi and a sim card from mrsimcard.com

Had the same issue as bgs. Was doing ok and them boom. Done.

Biggest issue was that phones are set to backup data, pictures, apps etc when on wifi. On the Mifi, your phone thinks it's normal wifi so it backs up everything and transmits pictures at full size and it really tore into our data.

Be sure to turn off any photo to cloud back up along with App updates. Reduce the use of social media like snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. That should keep the data use to reasonable levels.

Also, hadn't thought about what aarpskier said about the International plan for the mifi. Will look into that for the next trip instead of a local sim card.