DisneyDude

I am travelling in the UK and have just installed a local SIM card (co-incindentaly TMO). For GBP 7.50 ($11) I get 2 hours of US & Canada calls (can't beat that) and for GBP 2.50 ($4) I get 5 days of data, capped at 25MB - VOIP & IM not permitted either.
Only problem with a local SIM is I temporarily have a different number - but at 10c per minute I can afford to call my own US number and adjust the message to tell folks to call me here in the UK

jsnydcsa

I always figured someday I may buy an unlocked iPhone, stick in my TMO SIM and be all set for phone calls, email (after setting up the iPhone to pull down my emails) and web surfing (using the TMO data plan, just like I occasionally do on my Curve) in the USA. E.g. I would surf with unlocked iPhone using TMO sim and the foreign carriers data network (the same network that delivers emails to me and lets me surf using my BB Curve).

Yes, I could also use the iPhone's WiFi (here and abroad) but always thought the TMO data plan (whether the US plan or the international plan) would also cover me. So, I figure, now (e.g. now that TMO has worked out the billing issue), since the TMO international plan is really just international email and not international data/web surfing (whether using my Curve or some other device), I would not want to be wildly surfing via a data network using my TMO SIM in an unlocked iPhone while abroad.

RayinMaui

I was just in the UK, Israel, Belgium & France.

With my 8900 I was able to call via UMA and keep my total bill to $7 for 14 days. I also used free WiFi in most places for data.

I'll watch for late bills, but so far so good...

ScottC

That is why I consider T-mobile and the Blackberry to be the best option out there for international travel.

stevenshev

This is really bad news - but, I add, it was only a matter of time. Now they need a data bolt on, just like ATT has.

AAaLot

UPDATE

I traveled in Honk Kong, Indonesia, London, UAE, & Oman in the last week.

Every time I got an SMS from T-mobile warning me that there might be applications on my BlackBerry that may use data while traveling.

Wiggums

I had a friend who got charged a lot in Thailand, but not the other countries.

I use HTC with unlimited data and my e-mail uses data. Blackberries use a specific server for e-mails, but I use regular data. $15 for every megabyte. I don't think I even paid more than $1 a day when I was in Australia.

MaximilienRobespierre

What is it about the Blackberry that makes its email different from any WM PDA accessing a POP server? Seems to me T-Mo has a market sitting there unexploited (I'm a Wing user).

Dubai Stu

They say that the difference is that Blackberries are more efficient in the amount of data they use. I've installed a data counter on my BB and can tell you that for mail they use almost nothing. That said, I'm willing to bet you that Blackberry makes carriers who sign on with their service agree to certain data roaming rates.

MaximilienRobespierre

I can't disagree with any of that - but would a few thousand PPC users bring the network to its knees? I've never been able to fathom T-Mo's business models.

mbreuer

Basically, the Blackberry BIS contacts your pop or imap server and delivers emails to the phone. WM (and many other devices) contain built-in pop or imap clients. Those devices access the email server directly. The polling of the server to find out if there is new mail is just one of the inefficiencies that doesn't occur. Yes, WM does have a similar "push" technology, but you've got to have Exchange as the backend.

biffbo

Not sure where else to post this for now....

I recently purchased a My Touch phone 1 day prior to leaving for China for 2 weeks. I did this AFTER consulting with a T-Mobile rep telling him where I was going and that I wanted to make sure the phone work there via another sim card or whatever.

I turned on the phone in China and to my surprise, it rang and I got a call from the US....it was already working. I thought..."OK, no need for the sim card etc." ..Seeing as I was not planning to use the phone much, I figured that any roaming charges would also be reasonably low.

What I did not bargain for was that simply by having my phone turned on, it was all by itself, adding up it's own data roaming charges...to the tune of OVER $3000 in the two weeks!!!!!! The default settings were set up to automatically run up my bill. Almost as if T-Mobile had boobytrapped my phone or sabotaged it to make them money.

I may have sent all of 20 emails from the phone while in China and made around 30 calls and received about 20 calls....very light use.

I have talked to several T-Mobile reps about this and they are all unsympathetic about this. I do not think that these charges are reasonable. I do not hesitate to pay for charges if they are MY charges, but these are the phones OWN charges in my opinion. At least 90% of these data roaming charges are erroneous and not because of any of MY usage. The "android" (An android is a robot[1] or synthetic organism[2] designed to look and act like a human.) seems to have a mind of it's own and now had a bill of it's own too.....

If GM sold me a car that was setup to automatically start up at 3am and run for 4 hours without me knowing it.....I bet that Judge Wopner would agree that GM would owe me for the spent gas. The DEFAULT settings for these type phones should always be set to a non-chargeable setting and ONLY ship with settings that will not alter or add too your bill....my opinion.

I now know how to manually shut off these services to avoid these bills in the future, but I was not made aware of this potential nightmare (which T-Mobile has known about since the G1 ...as I find out by internet searches about this problem) when talking to the TM rep prior to my trip to China. Knowing about this problem and not fixing it is either BAD management or a malicious billing scheme.

UGH!!!

HELP!

jsnydcsa

Though I can't help with the specific problem of T-Mo's new data roaming fees (as opposed to International EMail - which ScottC pointed out as a difference in one of the earliest replies to this thread). Here's what I would advise:

1) Admitted this is too late but, mainly because of this thread (and others related to AT&T's international data roaming charges for iPhone users), I have become very very very vigilant about drilling way way way down to the exact answer I need on these issues including asking what, if anything, I need to do to ensure the phone does not do something automatically that can run up my bill. Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming you here (indeed, you spoke to the TMo rep and were under immense time pressure before the trip), but my advice to future reviewers of this thread is to get very detailed with the rep, get a name, ask specific tech questions about how to ensure this doesn't happen to you, and be prepared for a battle upon your return (when it inevitably does happen).

2) I've always found T-Mo to be very reasonable about these types of screw ups and I would continue to elevate the issue through their billing people and, if necessary, with corporate (sorry, no juice in the case of the latter as it never went that far for me).

Here's my example, I was a fairly earlier adopter of the TMo Hotspot at home service. Unbeknownst to me (mostly because of me - see now I've leave my lesson), international calls were billed at full-boat TMo international call rates - didn't matter if you were using their cell network or via your Hotspot service. I blithely chatted away to folks all around the world for the entire billing cycle (who needs Skype!) and got a whopper of a bill. I called T-Mo immediately and basically said, why would I go from $0 worth of international calls for years with T-Mo to $1000+ for a month (to wit the first month of HotSpot at Home Service), they listened and blam, rolled back all the charges.

You might try the same thing with them in your case. Listen, you spoke to the rep and started up with a new phone with all these new wackadoodle features and had zero idea that the phone would automatically start ringing up charges. Through your email is sparse on the subject, it sounds like you went from something less sophisticated phone (perhaps one without data, certainly one without Android) to the myTouch. Such a ramp up, a la my experience with HotSpot, to a totally new setup should not be an "instant" knowledge of all the costly pitfalls associated with the new device. If you want to throw in some fake indignation, my bet is there was no significant manual with the device much less a "warning" - hold the legalistic flaming please - about international data charges. Use that against them.

Basically, what can they do except say no and hold you to the charges. Any reduction is a start.

FWIW - I've seen so many threads about this and similar blog posts elsewhere (see e.g. a comment to a Pogue post re: placement of the internet access key on Verizon phones which, if pressed by accident and immediately canceled still charges the user for data charges), I think this is another way mobile carriers are setting up the customer for all sorts of additional charges. As price competition seems to be all the rage these days, all the companies are looking to tack on "extras" (see, e.g., the airline industry) to extract extra cash from their customers. To the ramparts!

dtsm

I am not familiar with Android but have extensive use with both BB and iPhone internationally. Neither of these smartphones are set up by default to automatic download data or to be set for a 'rip-off'.

If you started surfing the internet, checked espn, cnn, whatever, you will be charged for data usage and that can get high.....

Your bill was not necessarily extensively high because of the above emails or calls, unless you were on for long period....keep in mind international roaming can cost as much as $2.00 per minute so light use (your total 50 calls in/out) is already $100 if only one minute per call. If 10 minutes per call, that's already $1,000. You get the idea.

If you downloaded emails with large attachments, same story.

I would read carefully your bill to see exactly what the fees were for? If for calls, you can't argue or negotiate. If for data use, I've found TMO CS usually pretty understanding....certainly better than AT&T or Vz, IMHO.

Good luck.

AAaLot

I had something similar and tried and tried with different reps. No luck.

I finally wrote a NICE letter to the corporate office. They refunded what I thought was reasonable for them to refund.

In fairness to T-mobile today: they do send you a SMS as soon as you land in a foreign country warning you to turn off apps that may use data in the background.