Hello beautiful people, and welcome back on the route! 🙂

Today we are going to talk about INTERNET ACCESS, which for digital nomads like us, has today the same importance as our comfy beds, foods and passports!

A bit sad to say perhaps, but today Internet has become so much of a basic necessity for many, that our lives and habits literally dependent on it: learning apps, communication apps, news apps, fitness apps…and then for many also work is internet-dependant!

Being Internet access so important to our modern lives, it would be nice to think Internet access as an universal right, buuuuut…. well, we are so far away from it!

Frontiers between countries are not only on maps, but also in the net!

Our world “NET-work” is a net divided by invisible walls, by national legislations and private interests, and traveling while navigating internet freely is not always easy nor straightforward!

Ever happened to you that you land somewhere new, and suddenly the apps you normally use don’t work anymore?

You want to watch a F1 grand prix on your national TV and it results geo-fenced?

You want to watch a series on Netflix but it is not anymore available in your new country?

Or some sites are black-listed and unaccessible all together?

Spinning wheel, error message, or a page that just refuses to load, and suddenly you’re standing in an airport wondering if it’s your phone, the Wi-Fi, or the entire country.

A damn pain in the App if you ask me 😅😅😅 

Here’s the thing we learned on so many travels around the world: it’s almost never a coincidence, and it’s almost never your phone!

Local regulations, licensing deals, and network restrictions all decide what you can actually reach the moment you cross a border, and the public Wi-Fi in airports, hotels and cafés adds its own layer of mess on top!

The good news?

Ninety percent of this becomes a non-issue with about twenty minutes of prep before you leave!

Let’s get into it!! 🙂

So, What Actually Changes

When You Cross a Border? 🌍

More than most people expect before their first long trip, honestly! xD

Years ago, we also used to assume the internet was just… the internet.

One global thing…

Then we started moving around properly, from country to country and continent to continent, and realised it’s more like a patchwork of very different internets, stitched together and sold to you as a global one.

There are basically three different reasons something stops working abroad, and they’re worth telling apart, because the fix is different for each:

1) Government censorship.

Some countries (most of the actually!) block certain social media, messaging apps, or news sites outright.

China’s “Great Firewall” is the most famous one: Google’s whole suite (Gmail, Maps, YouTube), WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, X, Telegram, Signal, Reddit and most Western news outlets are unreachable in mainland China, though Hong Kong and Macao are a different story.

One tracking database live-tests 396 blocked sites in mainland China daily, and that’s just the ones somebody bothered to catalogue!

2) “Not blocked, just annoying” restrictions.

Plenty of countries don’t ban things, they just make them inconvenient.

The UAE is the classic case, with long-standing restrictions on VoIP calling through apps like WhatsApp and Skype, which nudges everyone toward licensed local alternatives instead.

3) Licensing, which has nothing to do with politics.

This one catches people completely off guard, because it’s not censorship at all, it’s contracts.

Streaming platforms buy content country by country, so the library you left at home genuinely isn’t the one waiting for you.

Some numbers that made us laugh when we first saw them:

• Iceland has had one of the largest Netflix libraries in the world, at over 9,700 titles as of early 2025
• The UK sits around 8,893 titles, roughly 13% more than the US
• The United States, the country most people assume gets everything first, has ranked around 11th globally by library size

TV Series, football, motor racing, movies…all video content can be subject to licensing and thus, country-wide restrictions!

So no, you’re not imagining it when half your watchlist disappears after landing 😅

And the wider trend isn’t exactly cheerful.

Freedom House’s annual Freedom on the Net report has now recorded 15 consecutive years of declining global internet freedom, covering 72 countries and about 87% of the world’s internet users.

When you think about it, that sounds alarming as f*** is you ask me!

As a young adult grown up in the internet golden age, that makes me very sad to realize…

In the same report, people in at least 57 of those 72 countries were arrested or imprisoned for something they said online during the coverage period, a record high.

UNESCO has also tracked a rise in state-ordered shutdowns, with figures pointing to roughly 313 internet shutdown incidents across 52 countries in 2025 alone.

But let’s go back to us!

None of this means we’re doominly stuck, we can subvert the doom with a bit of preparation, so don’t give in my friends, here we will show you how we do it, and how you can do too! 🙂

Quick Tip: before you leave, spend five minutes checking whether the apps you genuinely depend on (banking, work tools, your family group chat) are known to have problems at your destination. Five minutes at home beats two hours of panic in a hotel lobby, trust us!

Unlock the Power of VPNs! 

Probably you’ve heard this word before: VPN!

VPN are advertised pretty much everywhere nowadays: on youtube, on blogs, on socials… and well, they are a very cool service indeed!

But let’s start with understanding what a VPN actually is, because a lot of people nod along without anyone ever explaining it properly xD

A VPN is a “virtual private network”, imagine it like a net of computers scattered around the world which encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a server somewhere else, so anyone snooping on the network you’re using sees scrambled nonsense instead of what you’re doing!

Two things happen as a result:

• Your traffic becomes much harder to read for anyone else on that airport or café network

• Your connection appears to come from wherever that server is, which is why services that were unavailable can become reachable again

That’s it. No magic, no hacking, just encryption and a detour!

You can be in Italy, but your connection can appear from the UK by simply installing a VPN and clicking “ON”. Or from Belgium. Or from Argentina. You name it! 🙂 

To give you an example: you’re on an Android device while traveling. You can choose a reliable free VPN for Android from a trusted provider, install it on your phone and puff…in less than 5 minutes you can reach services that otherwise would remain off-limits from anywhere, and access them in a more secure and crypted way too!

And if you read carefully, I wrote TRUSTED PROVIDER.

Yes, because when choosing a VPN here’s the part that matters most: the provider matters more than the app!

What we are normally looking for when choosing one, these are our honest tips:

• A clear, readable privacy policy (if you can’t understand it in two minutes, that’s the answer)

• Independent security audits, published rather than just mentioned

• Regular updates, not an app last touched two years ago

• A transparent business model – you should be able to work out how they make money

That last one is the big one!

Most “free” VPNs make their money doing exactly what a VPN is supposed to prevent: collecting and selling your data.

A free tier from an established, audited provider is a completely different animal from a random app promising “unlimited free VPN, no logs, no ads.”

Quick Tip: servers cost real money. If an app offers unlimited everything for free with no visible business model, you’re not the customer, you’re the product 😉

One more thing worth knowing before you travel: VPN legality varies by country.

They’re perfectly legal in the vast majority of the world, but a handful of countries – North Korea, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Belarus and Iran among them – criminalise or heavily restrict their use, and others actively block VPN services rather than banning them outright.

Russia had reportedly blocked 469 named VPN services as of March 2026, and one study found the UAE blocking around 83% of the VPN services tested.

Check the rules for your destination before you go, not after, and if you plan to download one, it is always better to download it before leaving home as you never know if you’ll be able to download it once at your destination! 😉

Switch Server When Slow!

This one is stupidly simple (yet we wish someone had told us sooner!).

Sometimes a site or service still won’t load, and the instinct is to assume it’s blocked, or that the VPN isn’t working.

Often it’s neither.

The specific server you connected through is just overloaded, or it simply doesn’t route well to what you’re trying to reach.

Switch to a different server location and it frequently fixes itself in seconds.

Most decent providers offer servers across dozens of countries, and the difference between a congested one and a fresh one can be the difference between:

• A video call that drops every ninety seconds, and one that just works
• Streaming stuck at potato quality, and streaming that actually loads
• A page timing out, and a page appearing instantly

Our rule of thumb now: if something feels slow, try two other servers before assuming anything is broken.

Usually pick one geographically close to where you actually are, since distance genuinely affects speed.

But if you’re after region-locked content, that’s when a server in the “right” country matters instead 😉

How to Stay Safe

with Public Wi-Fi?

Airport and hotel Wi-Fi is useful, and we’re not going to pretend we don’t use it constantly.

But it is good to keep in mind, that it is also one of the easiest environments in the world for someone to sit quietly and intercept unsecured connections.

The attack that worries security people most is the “evil twin”: someone sets up a network with a name close enough to the real one that a tired traveller connects without thinking.

Airport_Free_WiFi versus Airport Free WiFi.

That’s the whole trick.

And the equipment to run one costs less than $500, which is the genuinely uncomfortable part.

McAfee’s 2025 Travel Security Report found that 25% of travellers experienced hacking attempts while using public Wi-Fi abroad, and cafés, restaurants and hotels rank as the most common places these fake networks appear.

So, here are few habits that might actually come in handy: 

• Ask the venue for the exact network name. 
• Turn off auto-connect for open networks in your phone settings
• Keep the VPN on for anything that isn’t casual browsing – even if you connect to an “evil twin”, a VPN can bounce around your data and hide them from data thieves
• Use unique passwords plus multi-factor authentication on anything that touches money
• Log out of banking apps rather than leaving sessions open

That MFA point is worth underlining: even if a network is compromised and credentials leak, a second factor is usually what stops it becoming an actual problem.

Quick Tip: save your online banking and payment confirmations for a network you actually trust – your own mobile data, or a hotspot from your phone – rather than the café downstairs. Mobile data costs a few cents. A drained account can cost rather more!

Why Updates Are Annoying,

But Skipping Them Is Worse!

We know.

“Update available” popping up on travel day is irritating, and “remind me tomorrow” is right there.

There’s also the classic fear that an update will slow the phone down, which is a very good excuse to keep postponing it until you can’t anymore. We’ve done it plenty of times.

But the numbers are hard to argue with.

Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 31% of breaches started with an unpatched vulnerability — the single most common way in.

And attackers are quick: on average it takes them around 5 days to start exploiting a newly discovered flaw.

Translation: the patch exists, it’s public, attackers already know about it — and yet a lot of phones simply never install it!

What we update before every trip:

• Operating system
• Browser
• VPN app
• Banking and payment apps
• Anything storing passwords

Our habit now, after being victims of a data breach last year, is to do it all the night before departure, on a network we trust, instead of fighting a 2GB download on airport Wi-Fi.

One less thing to think about once you land 🙂

So, don’t forget, updates are for your security, never skip them!

Conclusions 🙂

And here we are at the end 🙂

We hope you saw how nothing of this is truly complicated, and it will be a breeze once you’ve done it a couple of times!

Check what’s restricted before you go!

Keep a VPN you actually trust on your phone!

Be a bit picky about which networks you log into!

Update your stuff on a good connection instead of a bad one!

And enjoy your trip with internet access from wherever you are! 😀

Internet isn’t one global thing, but understanding its logics and getting the right tools (such a reliable VPN service), it can allow us to use it as a global thing! 😉

It’s the same principle as everything else on the road, really. A little preparation buys you a lot of freedom later 🙂

So, before you go:

• Has an app or a site ever completely stopped working on you mid-trip? Which one?
• Do you already travel with a VPN, or is this the nudge to finally set one up? 😉
• And which country surprised you most with its internet restrictions?:)

Let us know in the comments below, it’s always nice to have a chit-chat with fellow travelers!😀

Here are a few other articles you might enjoy:

7 Essential Tools for the Modern Digital Nomad

Internet in Your Camper | How to Stay Connected EVERYWHERE!

Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article! 🙂