What I Wish I'd Known Before Landing in the US Without a Working SIM
Landed at JFK for a supplier trip, phone in airplane mode, plan being "I'll just sort it at the kiosk." The kiosk had a line long enough to make you reconsider your entire relationship with connectivity. Twenty minutes in, the eSIM I'd tried to set up over the airport wifi the night before still hadn't activated, my UK carrier was quietly billing me a daily roaming fee for the privilege of being reachable, and the supplier I was meeting had already texted twice asking where I was.
This is not a rare Tien story. It's the default one. Every trip that isn't London to Đà Nẵng and back turns into some version of the same fifteen minutes of standing in an arrivals hall doing math on data I don't have.
So the next US trip, I ordered a physical SIM ahead of time instead of trusting an eSIM QR code to survive customs. The one I landed on was the Infimobile 12-month prepaid plan, 15GB of high-speed data a month with unlimited talk, text, and slowed-down data after that, running on T-Mobile or Verizon's actual towers depending on which SIM you get.
Who Actually Needs This
Not everyone. This is a US-only plan on US networks, so if your trips are Đà Nẵng to London and back, this does nothing for you. It's built for a specific situation:
- ✈️ You travel to the US often enough that a fresh eSIM every time is a waste of an afternoon
- 📱 You've got an unlocked, compatible phone (check before you buy, not after)
- 💻 You're comfortable doing your own account setup and troubleshooting online
- 🧳 You'd rather pay once for the year than deal with roaming bills or airport kiosks every trip
What It Gets You
The actual allowance
15GB of high-speed data per month, refreshed monthly across the full 12-month term. Go past it and you're not cut off, you're just throttled to a crawl for the rest of the month, which is fine for texting your team but not for anything video-heavy.
The network underneath
Infimobile isn't its own network, it's riding on T-Mobile or Verizon depending on which SIM you activate. That matters more than the brand name on the box. Coverage in most US cities is what you'd expect from those carriers directly, with the usual asterisk that MVNO traffic gets deprioritized when towers are busy.
Setup
A 3-in-1 SIM kit, activation online, and the option to port an existing US number if you have one. No activation fee. Sims need activating within 60 days of purchase, which is easy to forget if you buy it weeks ahead of a trip.
💡 Tien's Note
Activate it before you fly, not at the airport. A few reviewers hit activation errors that needed a working internet connection and patience to sort out, which is the last thing you want to be doing on airport wifi with a supplier waiting on the other side of arrivals.
The Honest Version
3.8 out of 5 from 103 ratings, which sits right in the "works for most people, genuinely frustrates some" zone rather than the "everyone loves it" zone, and the reviews back that up. The people who like it really like it: one reviewer ported a number in under half an hour and called the year of unlimited talk and text plus 15GB monthly an absolute steal, working out to something like a couple of coffees a month. Another compared it favorably to bigger-name prepaid brands and said the network held up fine on T-Mobile towers.
The people who don't like it, don't like it a lot. A handful hit activation errors that never resolved, and when they called customer service for help, found the number didn't work or nobody could answer a technical question about the connection. One reviewer said the online activation form had broken fields that wouldn't accept input at all. Hotspot access is a separate add-on, not included, and more than one review flagged that as something they wished had been clearer going in. If your test of a product is "what happens when it goes wrong," the answer here is: you're mostly on your own.
Amazon's own return policy is your safety net if activation fails outright, and a few reviewers used exactly that. Worth knowing going in rather than finding out at the gate.
I've had two trips on it since JFK. Both times it worked the way the good reviews said it would. I still wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't willing to sort out their own tech problems if something goes sideways, because Infimobile clearly isn't going to sort it out for you.
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