Phone, text and online data access while overseas is an important logistic to figure out for nomads, expats and travelers alike. There are a lot of great options nowadays for eSIMs like Airalo, Eskimo or RedteaGo to get easy data access overseas. However, if you’re an American and need access to a US mobile phone number to receive text message verifications, you may need to maintain a US mobile phone carrier. A number of online banks and credit card companies have tightened their restrictions on accepting VoIP numbers so our Google Voice number no longer suffices. After extensive research on US mobile phone carrier options, we discovered Tello, a service that provides a real US phone number that banks accept, all for a very affordable $5 per month (or $60 per year) plus taxes.
In this blog post, we’ll share why we think Tello is a fantastic low-cost carrier option, walk you through setting up an account, and show you how to use it effectively while traveling internationally.
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