Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can’t transcribe a language you don’t understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn’t have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.

That’s assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.