Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Canada Trip = Large Phone Bill

From AT&T's website:

International data roaming can get expensive quickly. For example, opening an email with a 5 megapixel picture in it, or downloading a 3-minute video on YouTube, each takes about 2 MB of data. The cost would be almost $40, based on pay-per-use international data rates of $0.0195/KB.

$24.99 per month - 20 MB Data Global Plan (Overage is $0.005/KB)

Translation: Good thing I checked this before leaving. Options: Turn off data entirely while out of the country, or pay at least $25 to check email in the mornings and hope I don't need Google Maps.

Sending Text Messages When Outside the U.S.: $0.50 per message sent. Home package rates apply to all text messages received when roaming internationally.

Translation: You can send, but I may not respond. This seems somewhat lenient for AT&T.

Calling and Traveling to Canada: AT&T Canada ($4.99 per month; $0.59 per minute while roaming in Canada.)

Translation: I can pay $4.99 for the right to only pay 59 cents per minute to use my phone in Canada. Without this plan, it costs 79 cents per minute. The break-even point on this is 25 minutes. Will I use my phone for more than 25 minutes the whole time I'm in Canada? Hmm...

2 comments:

Jason said...

I don't have an international card to take... and if I have access to WiFi, all my problems go away because I have internet and email access. The problem is that in order to have WiFi, I have to be in a hotel, basically.

Jason said...

Also, why pay for IP calls when I could just use Skype?