Sorry for the super long post, but here's my experience with Freedom Roam Beyond, and my opinions!
I'm with Freedom Mobile, and am currently upgraded to the Roam Beyond 60GB plan, as I was doing the Camino Del Norte late March through early May. It worked really well for me. I had good cell coverage throughout the route. 60GB was way more data than I needed, even with running
Wise Pilgrim, Gronze and Garmin Connect route tracking constantly. So I occasionally also used my phone as a Personal Hotspot for my iPad, like if hostel WIFI was flaky or I wanted to use my iPad in a restaurant. (Not much though, as that burns data AND battery quite quickly.)
It includes unlimited long distance call back to Canada too. I used that quite a bit and it worked fine.
I only had one problem where there was some kind of "could not connect to network" issue, and after consulting Google, that was fixed easily by going into and out of Airplane Mode.
In the past I have used Orange (eSIM purchased in advance) and Vodafone (SIM purchased in Porto) in Portugal and Spain last October. They worked fine for data and texting, but there are some inconveniences obviously to not using your home number. The most annoying inconvenience is dealing with our Visa bank's insistence on texting a validation number for all online Visa transactions to my Canadian phone number, and refusing to use a European number for that. If you want to buy tickets to attractions or trains or whatever online while on the road, you're screwed unless you activate your home SIM and pay the outrageous daily roaming charge. Then there is letting folks know your away number and dealing with sites that use that number as two factor authentication, and changing it all back afterward. (Whine, whine, whine - sorry!) And, they usually provide minimal voice calling time, like 30 minutes a month. One call to a help desk somewhere and that's gone and you're into extra charges.
Anyway, for these reasons, we decided to try Freedom Mobile. It has been really good. We use a very basic plan of theirs while at home, but did a temporary US roaming upgrade for a short trip there. Easy and immediate to downgrade to the lower rate when home. Based on that good experience I decided to use it for the Camino trip.
Note that there are some limitations on the Roam Beyond plans. I had to purchase it for a minimum of 3 months. I was okay with that because I was going to be away for a 7 weeks anyway. But if you're doing a short trip you might want to look at their other roaming options. We will be doing that for a short trip to England in September.
I don't think it is really that expensive. When you consider that if you get a European SIM & plan, you still have to continue paying for your home plan even though you are not using it. For example, if a European cheap data plan costs for 20 euro (~$25cdn) for the duration and I'm still paying $40 a month to Telus or whoever for nothing, then it's actually costing me $65 a month for my phone while travelling. Freedom's Roam Beyond 60 costs me $70 per month, that is, $5 more. All the convenience of my home number, unlimited LD to Canada, and tons of data for $5 a month seems like good value to me.
They also have a less expensive Roam Beyond 15GB. Based on my usage that would have been enough for me. I used about 10GB of data over the 46 day trip. Of course, your mileage may vary.
