I am going to China in 10 days from the US. I have an iPhone through ATT and it does not seem to be unlocked.
Everyone here has been recommending getting a local SIM card at the airport but I’m not sure how I can do that.
I know I need the phone for Alipay and everything else. How did others from the US handle this?
We just returned May 31, 2024 from traveling 2 weeks in China. Before leaving the US, we purchased ATT International Roaming plan for our iphones. The ATT International plan worked great around the large cities and was a little weak in some of the more rural areas. I read people’s comments about buying sim cards there but I cannot see why that would be important for travel in China. We setup Ailpay on our iphones before we left the U.S. Ailpay works great in with most vendors. Between Ailpay and a Visa you can pretty well cover any purchase. We did use our Visa once at an ATM to get some RMBs for pocket money.
If you have a locked ATT phone then it probably won’t work straight out of the box in China with a different SIM. You should probably ask ATT if you can/how to unlock your phone if you really want a local SIM.
I am wondering if you can use ATT esim and a sim for your Chinese number at same time. ATT roaming is pretty expensive as far as I remember.
Thanks for the information. I had heard that many apps were blocked in China on ATT, but that there was less blocked with T mobile.
Were you able to access apps or email on your phone
Thanks, what are the other options if I can’t unlock the phone? I am unclear on how others have handled this
I dont think you can nvm
I’d say may be consider borrowing a phone from someone?
Yes, as long as we had ATT reception, we had full access to all our apps such as FB, Instagram, Google, Gmail, etc. I sent daily emails back home, my wife posted FB photos and messages of our trip everyday. As I said earlier, as long as we were in the area of the cities we had ATT reception. We lost reception on some of the bullet train rides through rural areas. Also, we followed the advice of many and subscribed to a VPN (Express VPN) before we left the US. This was to protect our messages if we used hotel or another public Wi-Fi. Connection to a Express VPN server outside of China was very iffy. Sometimes the VPN would connect but I a lot places it did not. In hindsight, ATT International was very reliable and we really did not need the VPN. Of course, if you lived there for several months or a year or so a good VPN would be much more economical. We traveled in Beijing, Xian, Chengdu, Guilin and Nanchang.
This is your only option since your phone is locked.
Well I can’t comment on what other people do, but for your local SIM you can just use an old phone since the most you’ll be doing is receiving texts anyways. If you use your US phone number in China with data roaming (yes I know it could be expensive) you’re not subject to the GFW. Google etc should just work out of the box.