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(The following is an extremely naive hardware question that is seemingly too stupid to have an available answer online yet, so I'll seize the rare opportunity to be the first.)

I have a laptop with a WWAN card, and would like to use mobile broadband, which seems to involve buying a SIM card from a provider along with a plan of at least one year. I expect not to live in this country that long, and would much rather go monthly.

Can I just buy a SIM for an unlimited data cell-phone plan and stick it in the slot in my laptop instead? Or is there some essential difference in SIM architectures rendering this plan unviable?

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Technically there is no difference, both are "mobile broadband", both your laptop and your cellphone have 4G/LTE modems that work the same way. The SIM card is also the same and is only used to authenticate to the operator (each SIM contains a unique key), the modem does everything else.

(At least in EU, that is.)

However, mobile operators often forbid the usage cellphone SIM cards for anything else that isn't a phone, partly because of different pricing. Some operators are much stricter than others though (here it ranges from "make sure you don't exceed average usage" at one operator to "will terminate the card the moment we find out" at another).

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  • Intriguing. So I may be able to do this, briefly, but I need to look up this policy for various providers, somehow. I doubt it's prominently displayed information, though; any idea where to find it?
    – jdc
    May 11, 2022 at 15:49
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    It should be somewhere under "Terms & Conditions" or "Terms of Service" or "Fair use policy" on the carrier's website. If they offer you a service, they are going to publish the terms of using that service, even if it's a prepaid card and not a signed contract.
    – u1686_grawity
    May 11, 2022 at 15:57
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Annoyingly I cannot speak for the WWAN Card side of things - however, worst case scenario if the SIM does not connect with the WWAN you can always use a Mobile Hotspot to connect your Phone to your Laptop and receive internet connection that way.

I did this in my time in France. I took out a pay-as-you-go unlimited data SIM (pay monthly, no contract) and just connected my laptop to it that way.

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  • Thank you for this suggestion. I often do this now, but the data limit on my normal plan is inconvenient and the operating system on my telephone unfortunately tends to shut off wi-fi whenever the screen is turned off. There is a setting to ask the phone not to do this, but it does it anyway about half the time. I have not determined when it is that this behavior is triggered.
    – jdc
    May 11, 2022 at 15:47
  • Try Settings > Connections > Data usage > Data saver: Off (Android 10 example) - but note that you need to be very strict to turn off Mobile Data when not using it, this is the" little helper" that does that for you, when you forget.
    – Hannu
    May 11, 2022 at 20:32

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