For Germany that's false. You can get usually get one of the "no-frills" prepaid providers at any supermarket register (Medion Mobile at Aldi, Lidl Mobile at Li

For Germany that's false. You can get usually get one of the "no-frills" prepaid providers at any supermarket register (Medion Mobile at Aldi, Lidl Mobile at Lidl, jamobil at Rewe, ...). You will usually need internet to activate it. I (native German, living in the US) usually just use my american T-Mobile SIM. Thanks to their free global data roaming, I don't have to care which country I'm in when visiting Europe. It is "unlimited", but they throttle you to something like 10 kb/s. Still works fine for Maps/eMail/Facebook/... It's honestly not thaaat bad because I still had LTE, so the latency was great, just the throughput was mediocre. I was even able to use Facetime Audio. T-Mobile also supports WiFi calling on my iPhone, so as soon as I had WiFi, I was able to just call people back in the US for free.