Using an eSIM in Prague

What Prague is like on a phone

Prague is walked rather than ridden, so a day here is a long loop between the Old Town, Charles Bridge and the castle hill. The crowd is couples, families and people in for a concert or the Christmas markets, and all of them navigate lanes that barely carry a street sign. Data in the centre is generally easy to live with. What catches people out is the narrow stone canyons between buildings, where the map stutters and the compass arrow spins the wrong way.

Nach der Landung

Most people land at Václav Havel Airport (PRG), which still has no train of its own, so the standard move is bus 119 to Nádraží Veleslavín and metro line A into the centre. The other common doors are international trains from Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and Kraków into Praha hlavní nádraží, and coaches from across the region into Florenc. Switch the line on while you are still in the cabin or the carriage, so the ticket app is ready before the barrier. The ride in holds up fine, apart from the deep metro tunnels, where things go quiet for a stretch.

Wo sich die Abdeckung ändert

The centre is comfortable to use, but the complaint you hear again and again is the stone lanes around the Old Town Square, where your dot jumps to the wrong side of the street. The three metro lines run deep — line A at Náměstí Míru has an escalator the length of a football pitch — so treat time in the tunnels as offline. Up on the castle hill and in Petřín park it is better, simply because nothing blocks the view. Cellars of old beer halls and thick-walled churches are reliable dead spots; expect them rather than be surprised.

What a day here costs in data

A walking day in Prague runs somewhere around 700MB to 1.5GB, most of it the map you never quite close, menu translation and an unusually heavy photo habit because every corner photographs well. Buying tram tickets in an app and running museum audio guides nudges it up a little. If you upload a long clip every evening, budget about 2.5GB a day and stop worrying about it.

Districts travellers ask about

• Staré Město (Old Town) — Narrow lanes plus evening crowds put your map dot twenty or thirty metres off; agree to meet at a landmark rather than a dropped pin.
• Malá Strana and the castle hill — Higher than the other bank, so the view — and the signal — opens up; the castle queues are long, though, and the battery drains faster than expected because you shoot the whole way up.
• Vinohrady — The long-stay favourite: wider streets, lower buildings, and cafés where working off a phone line is far less painful than in the Old Town.
• Karlín and Holešovice — Two riverside districts turned food-and-gallery country; distances look shorter on the map than they walk, so check the tram before you leave.

Day trips out of the city

• Kutná Hora — About an hour by train with service the whole way, but inside the Sedlec ossuary and the old silver mine you are in sealed stone and should not count on anything leaving your phone.
• Karlštejn Castle — The train follows the Berounka valley and drops out briefly where the line squeezes past rock; the climb up to the gate is steep and tree-covered, so your position wanders a fair bit.
• Bohemian Switzerland — The one trip of the three where you should download offline maps before setting out: the sandstone gorges and the boat section through the ravine go silent for long stretches. Remember too that emergency calling does not work the same way as data — for what actually applies, check the park's own and the country's official guidance rather than anything you read second-hand.