3UK activation in USA?

[wolfbln]

Hi Powerlifter.

About roaming period: They've used to deactivate roaming in some cases when users used their SIM cards only for roaming. This was reported as soon as after 2 months of permanent roaming in some cases.

This has changed now, as Three UK has to comply with the new EU roaming rules. Now, there is a "monitoring period" of 4 months, in which your consumption may be "monitored". If this is predominantly in roaming, then they are allowed to impose a surcharge of around £8-9 per GB to roaming after that period. They are not allowed to disable roaming (at least in Europe) anymore like they did before.

About activation: Three says activation should take place in the UK. Actually, I've activated some Three SIM cards before through a roaming network in Europe. So I don't think that this is absolutely mandatory as the SIM is delivered pre-activated mostly as there is no registration or anything like this in the UK.

It's a viable choice as long as you can live with the known restrictions: strict 9GB per month cap for roaming, no 4G/LTE roaming outside the UK and European 3G networks get more and more crowded, low priorisation, hard to top-up (without surcharge) from abroad, UK "content lock" in place and strictly no tethering (WiFi hotspot use) on their Pay-as-you-go SIM. How they are going to handle the 4-months rule we'll see later this year.