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Using your phone when traveling can be a financial black hole. Upon your return home you can end up with an unpleasant surprise in the shape of a hefty bill of overages if you're not careful — thankfully mobile phone providers realize they need to make things more reasonable for their customers. The latest is AT&T which is now catching up with its main competitors T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon and has made several changes to its roaming services, with the aim of making things simpler.
International Day Pass
The new service AT&T are rolling out is the International Day Pass. The new service allows you to pay a flat daily rate of $10. For your money, you get to use the minutes, texts, and data included in your allowance at no extra cost. The plan is available for use in more than 100 countries for which AT&T has agreements. The plan also covers free calls back to the US. Using the International Day Pass service is very easy and can be added and removed from the myAT&T app on your phone. The new service goes live on Friday, January 27, 2017.
Other Options
While the new plan is a great addition, it still can work out to be pretty expensive if you are heading overseas for any length of time; even a 1-week vacation will run to $70. There are several other options available. The most complex is buying a local SIM card, although it is often the cheapest. Alternatively, you can opt for T-Mobile’s international data roaming, which lets your roam in over 120 countries without any additional data charges. Finally, you can opt for Google’s Project Fi service. There are a bunch of options for international roaming, and if you're regularly traveling overseas, you should consider what makes the most sense for you.
Conclusion
Any move by a telecom provider to provide simpler and cheaper options for roaming is a good thing. Hopefully, the competitiveness of the market will in the long run force providers to give their customers all-inclusive data roaming, as is common in most European markets.
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