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, payments, and sometimes access to the tools you normally use every day. So I started thinking about travel connectivity the same way I think about a small production dependency. Not glamorous. Not exciting. But if it fails, everything around it gets annoying fast. China is a good test case for travel connectivity China is not just “another country where you need data.” It is a place where your phone becomes a practical interface for the trip.…