Google Maps navigation on holiday, what will it cost?
Posted on 16-06-2016 to 15:00 by Dizono – 60 Comments”
Spoiler: less than you think.
Fifteen years ago you paid a small fortune if you satelietnavigatie in you car wanted. Then on the way to the south first in Hazeldonk to have to navigate, there to change the CD-ROM (that is such a shiny, round disc with a hole in it), then to the Belgian-French border to the same ritual to perform. And if you’re really far away, then you were on the threshold of Spain again. And then we have not even talked about the absurd prices that the dealer had changed hands for the collection of Western Europe on CD-ROM…
Today it’s different, with navigatieapps as Google Maps and Waze. Cards from all over the world, free in your pocket. Still, there are half tribes who on the border of their roaming off, and then continue to navigate on paper maps. There is no need for, if you are a bit clever approach.
First, let’s see how much data Google Maps uses. A difficult question, no clear answer to give is, it depends absolutely on where you are driving. Such kaartenapps work with so-called ’tiles’. The cards are divided into many small tiles, and the app only download the tiles you need. If you are driving on the motorway, then those tiles is pretty simple and the power consumption is very low: with ten Mb, you can sometimes be hundreds of kilometres away.
You can drive through, the tiles have much more information. The road system is much refined and all the streets have names and house numbers. Although the data usage to be higher, it falls under the mark with ca. 10 Mb per hour is still quite. Only that Mb’s abroad, of course, very expensive.
Well, that is happy. So you’ll make at Vodafone, for example, and beneficial use of the 4G network in the foreign country with the All-in-1 – Travel-bundle. For 2 euro per day you get 50 Mb of data (and a similar amount of minutes/text messages) and for 4 euros per day for the XL variant with 125 Mb. And we are talking not only about countries in the Western Europe, but also Eastern Europe (hello cheap roadtrip!) and even countries such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Because of course, we also like appen, Instagrammen and Facebook, on our vacation, I do have a tip for you to make the consumption lower to get: maps offline download. And not of the highways and their wide surroundings, that’s a sin of which too many Gb’s on your iPhone and in addition you want to be on the highway also fine file-information of Google Maps or Waze. No, download especially, the detailed maps of your destination. That cost is usually the most data and current traffic information is then also what is less important.