When we first got here for our Scouting trip, we knew we were going to need to get some kind of local data service. Sure, Verizon (our former carrier in the US) is perfectly capable of doing international data for some $X per day, but we were going to be here for six weeks, so it seemed like a smart thing to do.
One place where Portugal is living in the year 3025 is when it comes to mobile service. We were able to get an unlimited data SIM for 30€, which lasted for 30 days. Pretty slick! We both snagged ourselves one. Unfortunately, there’s just no simple way to renew it – if you don’t have a Portuguese phone number, you can’t sign up to the Vodafone portal, period. So the simplest thing is just go down to the shop and buy another one when the first one runs out. Feels a little wasteful, but it worked just fine.
So when we got here it was a no-brainer for us to sign back on with Vodafone. It was probably one of the first things we did on arrival. And, honestly, Vodafone has been fine. No complaints really. Other than two problems – it gets nearly zero reception in our house, and nearly zero reception at our local supermarket – Pingo Doce. The two places where we need reception the very most. I got into the habit of signing on to the Pingo Doce wifi from outside of the supermarket (it wants to send you a text message, which I couldn’t receive from inside the supermarket).
So as our contract with Vodafone has hit its two year mark (because we’ve been here two years!), we figured we might want to switch over to MEO. Our Mint Mobile (our low-cost US carrier, which we need to maintain our US phone numbers) happens to transit over the MEO network and always shows near full bars in the house and the supermarket. Our friend Sandra (who you might have seen mentioned in our “places to go in Lisbon” article) mentioned that, during the big blackout, MEO users were one of the last to lose connectivity, too – Vodafone people went down first. So MEO definitely does seem like the better bet for us.
A lot of things in Portugal hinge off of your phone number, so we knew we definitely wanted to do a number port; we wanted to make sure to hold on to our Portuguese phone numbers. Plenty of folks have explained that number ports are super-duper easy, and just take a few hours. So, no problem, we got ready to kick it off.
We decided to be “smart” (and you can imagine how that went), and tried to do the switch on Sunday. Plenty of time for the port to go through before work starts on Monday, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong.
So we ended up spending the better part of an hour at the MEO store in the local shopping mall. By the time we were done, our legs were tired from so much standing around. But we got physical SIM cards for our phones, and we had the guy help plop those in. (Our Vodafone SIMs were e-SIM already, so that when we travel it’s easier to pop in a local SIM card). Since our phones only allow two SIMs to be active at the same time, we decided to temporarily turn off our US e-SIMs for our Mint Mobile numbers. This way we could ride Vodafone until the switch was complete, and we’d be all ready once our new phone numbers came online. We also picked up a data-only SIM for Alison’s iPad – which unfortunately does not accept physical SIM cards; only e-SIMs. 10€ a month for like 50GB or something, apparently soon upgrading to 100 – way more than we need, but fine. To get Alison’s iPad up, we had to do a little dancing around – I converted my physical SIM in my iPad to become an e-SIM, then I transferred it over to her iPad, then I plugged the new SIM back into my iPad. Voila. Everybody has data now. We just have to wait on the phone numbers port now.
Monday rolls around – we get a few text messages in Portuguese from MEO, but nothing really definitive. Huh. It gets near end-of-day – still nothing. Shit. I mean, our Vodafone numbers were still working, so I guess it was ‘fine’? Maybe?
Tuesday comes up – around 10AM we get a text from MEO, now saying the port will happen on Wednesday between noon and 3pm, and that we should be all set after 3pm.
And, as you can guess – we weren’t. We were able to get some of our friends to test sending us SMS, and those did seem to work OK. But because the “metadata” on our new MEO SIMs wasn’t updated to say that our new phone numbers are actually our old phone numbers, so iMessage was kind-of broken for a while. That definitely sucked; that’s a lot of how we communicate to people, especially in the States. (Most people here just use Whatsapp for everything – so it matters less here I guess).
Finally, at some point on Thursday I notice that in my Cellular settings section my Vodafone eSIM now says “No phone number” – which I _guess_ is a good thing? Yay? I bounced my phone and all of the SIMs are all confused – the physical SIM in my phone from MEO is now labeled ‘Vodafone’ – probably because my number was now attached to it! Success! I deleted the blank Vodafone eSIM and renamed my MEO physical SIM back to MEO.
So at this point today, Friday – I think I’m all set. Unfortunately, Alison is *not*. I’m looking at her phone and it still shows the MEO physical SIM being attached to her temporary MEO number. Her Vodafone SIM still lists her Portuguese phone number. So she still has to have her Mint eSIM turned off. So I guess there’s nothing more we can do but wait.
But since my phone is up I decided to see if I can turn on the “OneNumber” service for my Apple Watch. We’ve occasionally been ‘saved’ by having a watch with Cellular – once Alison dropped her phone, cracking it, in San Francisco but was able to call me using her watch to help her get service at an Apple Store. My phone once ran out of juice and I was able to call her using my watch. And it’s pretty cheap here – according to MEO, around 5€/month, but with the first six months free. Not bad! Of course, I went through the signup process using the Watch app, and I got to the screen where it said how much it was going to cost, and it listed the price as 4.490€/month. Which is hilarious, but I clicked it anyways (because there’s no way they’re going to be able to try and charge me that). In just 20 or 30 minutes or so, I got a text message from MEO saying that my watch’s Cellular is now active. So, yay!
But as for Alison, we’re just stuck waiting. I’m hoping we don’t have to go back to the MEO store for her, but since it’s already Friday and she’s still not completely flipped over, I’m starting to suspect that we’re going to have to :/
So, if you’re moving to Portugal, I would definitely consider just starting with MEO from the get-go. I don’t know how well their sign-up process works with a non-Portuguese identity document, but I would hope that they can handle it. We had MEO for fixed-line internet at our old house, and they managed with it just fine there, so I would assume it’d work for cellular as well.
(edit) I did end up walking over to the MEO store – and they managed to fix her phone and/or her service in just a few short minutes! So we’re all set and fully ported over now!
Boa sorte, e até breve!
