Peace of Mind Organizing

Using my iPhone during international travel

19 November 2012

As I’ve mentioned, I went to Barbados the week of November 5. As I’ve also mentioned, I’m in love with my iPhone 4S and I would have had a hard time doing without it. Plus, since I ditched my landline a few months ago, my cell phone is my business line, so I knew I couldn’t just turn it off or leave it at home.

So here’s what I did (along with the lesson I learned):

My cell provider for my iPhone is AT&T. I simply gave them a call and told them my situation. I learned that there were three categories of communication I needed to concern myself with:

• Voice
• Text
• Data

I learned that for voice, I would pay $2.29 a minute, unless I signed up for the World Traveler program, which costs $5.99 a month. With that program, phone calls would be $1.69 a minute.

I learned that all my incoming text messages are counted against my domestic texting plan. I have unlimited texting, so that meant I could receive an unlimited number of text messages without incurring extra charge. Outgoing text messages, however, would cost 50 cents each, unless I chose an international texting plan. I chose the $30 a month plan for 200 outgoing text messages (with an overage charge of 35 cents per text).

When it came to data, I would pay 19.5 cents per kilobyte of data, unless I bought a package. I could have paid a $30 monthly fee for 120 megabytes of data or $60 for 300 megabytes. I knew that the villa where we were staying had free wifi, so I chose to forgo a data package.

That turned out to be a mistake. Of my friends with whom I was vacationing, mine was the only smart phone that actually worked in Barbados. When we were going out to dinner one night on the north end of the island, we realized we needed some mapping help. So I turned on data and got us to the restaurant (we’d ended up taking a wrong turn). I’m so glad I was able to do that!

I got my bill today and there was good news and bad news in it. The good news was that the monthly charges are prorated, so I paid only an extra $7.20 for the extra voice and text monthly fees. I did use the phone a little, and there was an additional charge of $10 for that usage.

The bad news was that the one little foray into data usage ended up costing $25.78. I used 1.2 megabytes using the maps app on my phone. If I had signed up for the global data plan, it would have cost me just $6 and I would have 118 more megabytes of data to play with. Oh well, lesson learned.

My takeaway from the experience is that the international charges from AT&T, when planned for properly ahead of time, are really fair. They’re well worth the expense for the convenience of being able to use my phone.

That’s reason number 2,220,897 why I love my iPhone!

Tagged with: iphone, technology, telephone, vacation

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