We are on our boat in Turkey using a Max Transit Duo. Turkey has a law that foreigners can only use their cell phones for 90 days (duration of Turkish visa) on in-country networks. If ex-pats stay longer they can either pay exorbitant tax to import their phones, or they can buy a tax-paid Turkish phone. We discovered that this law applies to cellular routers as well, when our Turkcell data Simm stopped working in our Max router.
We have a Turkish phone with a small amount of data on the account, so we tried connecting the router to that via wifi. It worked, the router was not seen on their network, so it wasn’t blocked. So I went to a Turkcell store and bought a mifi device and put our data Sim in that. Although the Peplink router tells us that everything is working fine, when we connect to the network, there is no Internet connection coming through. When we connect directly to the mifi, we are connected to the Internet. it works just fine. Here is what I see when connected to the Turkcell data sim:
We recognize that we could put the data sim with 100 GB into the phone and connect that way, but we would lose access to the phone, and we need to keep that phone number for work and What’sApp messages.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Christine Hodgins