pkoo

Hi, I'm asking this here because I can't find anything by searching through apple forums surprisingly. And I thought I'd get better answers here since a lot of people on FT travel internationally frequently.

I'm confused at how the dial assist function truly works on the iphone. In fact, I've been confused about this for a long time. The manual barely mentions it and the people at the apple store have no idea what I'm talking about... When abroad in, say, Lebanon, and I wanted to call a Lebanese number, I would just dial the local number with dial assist on. No problem. However, I'd frequently run into problems in larger countries where there are geographic area codes such as Germany. In those cases, I would just dial out then dial back into Germany. So my question is, with dial assist off, I would obviously treat it as if I was dialing from the US, but with it on, which of the following are true?:

Calling Germany within Germany with US phone & dial assist on

dial out - country code - area code - number
country code - area code - number
area code - number
number

And then would there be problems if I disabled the internet?

gfunkdave

The iOS manual says:

Make calls to your contacts and favorites while traveling abroad. (GSM) Go to Settings > Phone and turn on Dial Assist. Dial Assist automatically adds the prefix or country code for calls to the U.S.

star_world

This sentence makes me think it's worth clarifying something. If you dial a number from a GSM phone starting with +[country code] followed by area code followed by remaining digits, you're not "dialing out" of the country at all - and it has zero implications on the costs of the call. Most people who travel internationally on a regular basis store the full number for each contact in their phone so it will work regardless of where we are. In other words, a German contact might be saved as +498911223344, a UK contact might be saved as +447758400500, etc. You can call these numbers from your phone regardless of what country you're in, and if you're in the same country as the number you're calling you are not "dialing out" or anything like that.

The Dial Assist function just puts the +1 at the start of the number you're calling if it isn't saved in your contacts that way to allow you to call a US number. I believe it will do the same with some other countries if you've saved the country name as part of the contact.

pkoo

Well with the latest software it says under Dial Assist: Dial assist automatically determines the correct international or local prefix when dialing.

Where it says local prefix, I was wondering if that also included the area code because I noticed that in some countries, I had to try all 4 of the options in my OP before it working.

star_world

If you have included the country in the contact's address, and the national number is saved in the contact (including the area code) then it should work.

For example, if you have a German contact with a phone number of (089) xxxxxxxx you can save this number in your phone, include their address (or just Germany as the country) and with Dial Assist on, it should work. Your phone will convert this to +4989xxxxxxxx when you call the contact.

Fredd

We switched to T-Mobile earlier this week and bought an iPhone 5s. I'm trying to get up to speed on it before leaving on our first international trip with it early next week.

After reading this thread I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to find the setting before finding this after a search, leading me to believe T-Mobile phones do not incorporate Dial Assist:

If I'm wrong about that, I'd welcome any assistance.

randysea

I'm not seeing the iPhone add the Germany country code 49 as suggested in the underlined language above. All I can do is get it to add the international access code when dialing. This is 011 from in the US. It doesn't show on screen.

In the example above, it seems you would have to save the phone number as +49089xxxxxxxx. International Assist will not add the 49 (Germany country code) just because Germany is listed as the country. However, it will display that number as +49 (0) 89 xxxxxxxx. When dialing from the US, the phone will dial 0114989xxxxxxxx. This is what happened when I just tried it with a French number, similar to German numbers.

I believe that the parens automatically displayed around the 0 mean when dialing inside Germany, the country code and the 0 will not be dialed.

This also suggests that if you travel, it may be bad practice to omit the "1" at the beginning of your US contacts. Many of us started leaving off the 1 when cell phones no longer required the 1. Generally, landlines still do.

On a landline, the 1 is a domestic long distance access code. Internationally, the 1 is the country code for dialing the US from abroad. For example, from France you dial 00 1 nnn xxxx xxxx (where nnn is the area code).

Does anyone have more to add to this? Also consider two situations that may or may not work differently: You have an international plan and use it in the US and when traveling. Or, like me, you change SIM cards when in a foreign country so you have a local provider.

HDQDD

+1 I have all my contacts stored that way and it works great.