This is the conclusive, exhaustive and painfully detailed how-to-set-up-your-iPhone-to-go-abroad-so-as-to-not-add-several-decimal-places-to-your-at&t-bill. Google “iPhone data bill abroad” to find some horror stories from the less fortunate.

Want to avoid a similar fate while you are abroad? Solvate can research the best data and voice abroad plans for you, set up your add-ons and remove them promptly when you return. Send us request details, call 646.720.7110 or email delegate@solvate.com. (This is part of our Travel Planner and Customer Service Haggling services).

Read ahead for the full rundown on how this complicated issue works.

And don’t let iPhone friends go abroad without reading this too.

Don’t want to deal with the hassle? Let Solvate manage the entire set-up with at&t and your iPhone, prep you with a trip summary, and take care of removing add-ons upon your return. Get started with this form or by reaching us at teamalpha@solvate.com and 866.560.8463.

Voice
Texting
Data
Call at&t
Last absolutely necessary steps
When you return

Voice

You do NOT need to be on a special international plan to make or receive calls abroad, but you DO need to have your phone “turned on” for international calling if it is not already. (Yes, there is a difference. You’ll need to call at&t to make both changes.)

You pay per minute for voice calls abroad, regardless if you are calling or receiving. This is a flat “voice roaming” charge per minute.

Good news, you do NOT pay any additional international long distance charges per minute, just the voice roaming rate. Let’s say you are in Brazil. You can call Brazil, the US or Thailand at the same (steep) rate.

at&t offers a $5.99 World Traveler plan. All this plan does is give you a cheaper voice roaming charge per minute. This basically pays for itself after ten or fifteen minutes of calls. Caveat: World Traveler only gives you a cheaper rate for about 85 of the 200 countries at&t offers service for. The rest of the countries cost the same whether you have World Traveler or not.

Look at this list of countries covered by at&t World Traveler to see if the countries you are visiting are even covered by the plan. If they are, you can see your savings per minute with WorldTraveler.

If you’re headed to Mexico, you need the at&t Mexico plan, not World Traveler (remember, this is ONLY for voice). For $4.99/month, voice roaming is $0.59 instead of $0.99/minute.

If you’re going to Canada, you need the at&t Canada plan, not World Traveler. For $4.99/month, voice roaming is $0.59 instead of $0.79/minute.

Going on a cruise? at&t has special instructions for iPhone users going on cruises.

Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands? No need to keep reading, unless you enjoy pain. at&t considers that “the US.”

What about Visual Voicemail?

You have three ways to check your voicemail abroad:

1. Use data to check Visual Voicemail. This is extremely expensive and not recommended. (See below for more.)
2. Use a wifi connection to check Visual Voicemail. You will not incur data charges for this, but can only access Visual Voicemail from a wifi zone in this case.
3. Recommended: Call at&t before you go and turn Visual Voicemail OFF.
   If at&t’s normal Customer Care is closed, call the International Provisions Center (number in the right-hand column) as they are open 24 hours a day. They will give you instructions to check your voicemail the old fashioned way abroad (Press and hold 1 key, then press #, then give mailbox # (phone number), then voicemail password. Customer Care can reset your password if you forgot it.)
   Note: Checking voicemail this way will still cost you international Voice minutes, but not Data minutes.

UPDATE 7/10/09 A knowledgeable gentleman at the International Provisions Center gave us a more accurate description of how Visual Voicemail works abroad, so as of today our understanding is that Visual Voicemail only charges you a permanent voice rate, meaning that it costs you voice minutes to check it. It has nothing to do with data. So it doesn’t matter if Visual Voicemail is on or off when you are abroad. It will cost you minutes either way (old-fashioned or Visual) to check voicemail.

Further, if your phone is OFF, someone leaving a message will not costs you minutes. If your phone is ON, you get charged the same minute rate if the message is over 30 seconds long.

Texting

You do not need a special texting plan to send or receive texts abroad.

Cost to receive:  zero, kind of.

If you are on the 200 or 1500 texts/month plan, texts received abroad are free, but are deducted from your monthly text allotment. So if you are on the 200 plan and receive 200 texts while abroad, your 201st text received will cost you $0.50.

Cost to send: $0.50.

It costs the same to send a text no matter what texting plan you are on, and whether you are texting to another friend in that country, in the US or in any other country at&t has service.

MMS: iPhones don’t allow MMS, so no worries about what they cost. You can’t send or receive MMS, so there is no cost for them on the iPhone.

Data

You use data on your iPhone when you browse Safari, use apps, email, check your Visual Voicemail or download music on iTunes. You can even use data when your phone is off, depending on your push settings (see more below on this).

Wifi: Good news, if you are in a wifi zone abroad, you do not pay at&t for data roaming. Repeat, if you are wifi connected abroad, and very few places offer wifi, at&t will not charge you for data roaming. Keep a log of when you are wifi-connected so you can dispute if at&t messes up your bill.

If you aren’t in a wifi zone and you don’t have an international data plan, data costs $0.02/kb, or about $20/MB. (1MB = 1,024 kb)

If you are on an international data plan, but in a country that at&t doesn’t cover, data also costs $0.02/kb.

So how much data do you use?

Monthly usage between 100 and 400 MB is not uncommon for iPhone users. Read our instructions on how to calculate your average monthly iPhone data usage and multiply your MB by 20 to get your estimated cost/month if you spend a whole month abroad at your normal data usage level.

For example:

75MB is low end of usage. At this rate, a week abroad would cost about $400 in data roaming alone without an international data plan.

Now that you know your usage, figure out if at&t’s international data plans even cover the countries you’re visiting. Does this feel familiar? Separate process for Voice and Data, different countries and rules for each.

Look for the countries you are visiting on this list of countries covered by at&t’s international data plan.

If the countries you are visiting are on this list, here are your international data plan options:

If you are visiting countries at&t’s international data plans do not cover, either plan on spending a lot of money, or take the steps below to completely turn off your data. Note in the chart above that you can hop on a more expensive data plan and get a cheaper data rate for countries not covered. So you might want a data plan to get half the rate, $0.01/kb on countries not covered.

But wait! There’s more! For the following countries, the rate is $0.02/kb, even on a data plan: Algeria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bolivia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, Brunei, Faroe Islands, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Macau, Macedonia (former Yugoslavia), Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Venezuela.

Call at&t

Now, call at&t to:

1. Get authorized to make international calls
2. Get on World Traveler if you want it
3. Get on a data plan if you want it
4. Confirm all the rates here, in case at&t has changed things up

Call at&t International Provisions Center (open 24/7!) at 800.335.4685.

(To reach at&t in general, dial 611 from your phone, or 800.331.0500, then press 1 for English, 0, then 0 again for a live representative).
Make sure to write down the following:

1. Agent name
2. Time and date of call
3. When your billing cycle starts

Now do the following things to your phone.

1. Turn data roaming OFF:

Go to Settings –> General –> Network –> Data Roaming



2. Reset your data “usage tracker.”
   (at&t says you’ll be able to track data usage for your trip — assuming they are reporting it as it comes.)

Go to Settings –> General –> Usage

Last absolutely necessary steps when you return

Remove your add-ons! World Traveler and your international data plan will stay on your monthly bill indefinitely until you cancel them. But you cannot cancel them too soon. There is a delay for at&t to get your usage details from third-party carriers, and if you cancel prematurely, at&t will bill you at unprotected rates for those straggler charges.

An agent at at&t’s International Provisions Center gave us details on 1/15/09 on how this works:

Voice take a while for third-party carriers to report to at&t. How do you know when at&t is done receiving those charges from abroad?

Look online for the unbilled status of your account. If the last number you called while abroad is on that bill, you can now call at&t to remove World Traveler.

Data is usually reported to at&t immediately. But how do you know for sure you can remove the data plan?

You can’t look this up online, so call at&t and ask them if any more data charges are pending. They can look this up in their system in the unbilled portion of your data statement.
If you managed to follow us this far, thank at&t and Apple for making this such a walk in the park.

8/04/09 update: Two reps at the International Provisions Center confirmed that at&t’s policy has changed for third-party carrier charges from abroad. Both Voice and Data charges appear within one day of your return from abroad. So call the next day and ask for Voice and Data international add-ons to be removed.

Unnecessarily complicated problems from our everyday vendors are precisely why Solvate is here. Want us to handle this one for you?    Send us request details, call 646.720.7110 or email delegate@solvate.com. This is part of our Travel Planner and Customer Service Haggling services.

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Tags: at&t, iphone, travel

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 6:12 pm and is filed under Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.