Treating Mobile Internet as Part of Your Travel Stack: Notes From Planning a Trip to China

When developers travel, we usually prepare the obvious things. Laptop charger. Power adapter. Cloud backups. Password manager. 2FA access. Offline copies of important documents. But there is one dependency that is easy to underestimate until it breaks: mobile internet. A trip to China makes this especially obvious. Not because China is hard to travel in, but because so many basic interactions are mobile-first: navigation, translation, ride-hailing, hotel communication, ticket confirmations, paym