Using an eSIM in Manchester

What Manchester is like on a phone

Manchester holds three crowds at once: football fans in for a fixture, students who stay the year, and travellers using the city as a launch pad for the Lake District or north Wales. It is the right size to walk and tram around all day, and the network feels more even than London's because there are no deep tunnels to worry about. What sets a day apart here is a big match, when tens of thousands of people converge on one place at the same hour.

When you land

Manchester Airport (MAN) takes long-haul flights directly and has its own rail and tram station attached to the terminal, while trains up from London arrive at Piccadilly. Switch the line on in the arrivals hall, because you have to choose between the train and the tram and they leave from different levels. The ride in keeps service almost the whole way since the route runs above ground; only the short passages under bridges and inside the station shed knock the speed down.

Where coverage changes

The centre and the whole Metrolink network stay connected because most of the route runs in the open air. The converted brick warehouses of the Northern Quarter, with their thick walls and steel windows, receive noticeably less deep inside than you get out on the pavement. On a match or concert night, tens of thousands of people are using the network inside a small radius, so uploading a clip as the ground empties is much slower than usual. Out in the northern suburbs, where the land folds into low hills and cloughs, there are patches where the signal thins.

What a day here costs in data

A day in the city runs about 800MB to 1.3GB, mostly from the tram app and maps. If you are here for football and shoot long video or go live from the stand, that single figure climbs faster than anything else and deserves several gigabytes set aside for the day. Students and remote workers taking calls from a café should count separately: one hour of video conferencing costs more than a whole day of map use.

Districts travellers ask about

• The Northern Quarter: Fine on the streets and around the murals, but a bar tucked deep inside an old warehouse or down a basement stair leaves you asking for the house Wi-Fi.
• Salford Quays and MediaCity: Open water and a tram stop at the door: steady enough for a video call outdoors, which makes it the easiest place to work mid-trip.
• Deansgate and Castlefield: Under the stacked iron rail viaducts is the wobbliest spot in the district; walk out to the canal basin and it settles again immediately.
• The university district and Oxford Road: A corridor in heavy use all through term-time; speeds can dip between lectures when everyone picks up a phone at once, without ever becoming unusable.

Day trips out of the city

• The Lake District: The valley roads between the lakes have stretches where the fells block everything for minutes at a time, and some ridge paths have nothing at all — load the route before you go.
• Liverpool: The train between the two cities is short and keeps service nearly throughout; once there, the open dockside gives you a solid connection the length of the waterfront.
• Chester and the Welsh border: Chester sits against the Welsh border, which is still the United Kingdom, so there is no cross-country worry here; the lanes running into the north Welsh hills do thin out in places, though.