Dear blog, sorry its been a while. But my musing will eventually end up here. Here’s another.

Last time I was in Brazil I was working remotely for part of it. I doubt Oracle would have coughed up for my international data roaming so I bought a pre-paid SIM chip here. Whenever I ran out of data, I’d run over to my local news stand, tell them my cell number and hand them R$ 10 (~2.50 USD at the time) for 500MB. I mostly used it as back up in case I lost connectivity during work hours and it worked great for sending all the WhatsApp messages I wanted. The data here is mostly broadcast on 3G, with 4G making some inroads.

The downside of switching SIM cards across countries is that it wreaked havoc with iMessage and my contacts on iOS. It auto-misconfigured a lot of my numbers to the Brazilian format and I wasn’t getting iMessages attached to my old phone number (which i resumed using when I got back stateside). Unwilling to undergo that again, my current cell provider, Ting, offers a decent roaming data package here given what I’ll use it for. I locked-out all my data heavy apps and only left Signal, WhatsApp and Maps. The downside is that I can’t make iMessage default to being less data savvy. WhatsApp lets me restrict media to wi-fi only, but iMessage just pulls it all down. Anyhow, my current data diet is at around 2-4 MB per day on cellular, and given Ting’s tiered usage plan, I’ll probably just end paying the same amount for 0.30/MB here. A downside I just found out is that Ting places a limit on how much roaming data I can use, so suddenly my data cut yesterday afternoon. But props to Ting’s customer service, I hopped on their online chat support and they lifted that limit, yet its still bad UX to not notify me about that (it was around 25MB).

WhatsApp is the prevalent texting app and constantly runs into trouble with Brazil’s somewhat lax wiretapping laws. Since they can’t break the encryption, intercepting messages becomes much more difficult and (supposedly) there are no backdoors. Amusingly judges will issue injunctions to have the telcos block the messaging app only have a higher-ranking judge to lift it since its now baked into current social-infrastructure (ordering cooking gas, neighborhood safety notifications, even meeting with your doctor). The telcos are happy to oblige, perhaps because the agnostic nature of data has gutted their exorbitant inter-operator fees for calls and MMS and this is their way of getting back. I wonder if WhatsApp can expand their user experience here to match WeChat, taking over the purchasing, commute and other capabilities of web platforms.