Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Offering Day Pass For International Travelers (cnet.com)
Starting Friday, AT&T customers who travel abroad can sign up for a new International Day Pass plan. Instead of paying by the minute, message or megabyte, the plan lets you pay a $10-a-day flat free so you can talk and text "all you want" and also access your data plan as though you're in the states. From a report: AT&T said the new plan is available for customers traveling to more than 100 countries listed here. To use the new plan, customers just need to add it once and it will automatically kick in each time they travel to a supported country, until it's removed.
The only thing more overpriced than this plan is their regular international rates.
ATT is garbage. Fortunately for them, their largest competitor is also garbage so they stay in business.
---
According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
Ain't competition great - T-Mobile has been including this in for no extra per day cost for a while now.
Cue someone explaining how this is the most evil thing AT&T has done since X in 3..2...1
Awesome. Now you can pay as much in a week as you usually do for a whole month, PLUS the base fee! All to get a thing that doesn't cost them a single dime more than they'd otherwise be paying!
Thanks, AT&T.
and that's how they'll grift people who dont know any better who come home all "where'd this 140$ come from, i didn't even use my phone that whole two weeks!"
A flat free? But what if I want a flat expensive?
So if I understand correctly, you pay $10 per day for unlimited talk and text but that's tied to your normal data plan, which has a monthly cap? Watch out if you bust that cap while on the International Day Pass plan, I have no idea what the charges will be.
So, "until it's removed... manually"? Does that mean that if you forget to de-activate it, you'll continue paying $10 per day even though you're back in the states?
That's about $300/month. What a bargain (especially in February)!
What a joke
$10/day to a Max of $50 to use my plan as is anywhere in eu or us.
What they need to do is have some weekly plan for travels to the USA. They'd make a fortune selling a cheap weekly throw away SIM with data and a few minutes and texts. Travellers want data for using Maps and looking up stuff of interest (and emails), but don't want to have to fork out $70 when they pay â10/month at home for 10G of data. Come up with something cheap for a week and you'll get plenty of tourists picking up a SIM every time they land. (Oh, and drop the charge for the SIM itself - in Europe, at least, the SIM and connection are free!)
What happens when you have this enabled and live near the border and your phone locks onto the other tower?
How is this a deal? Using a foreign SIM card, you can usually spend $30 for a MONTH of data. Some sample prices I've paid: (1) Vietnam - $6 for a SIM card for 3gb fast speed then unlimited slow speed for a month (2) Colombia - $13 for a SIM card for 3gb for a month or so (3) Australia - $30 for 9gb (5gb+1gb extra per weekends) for a month Even the most expensive of these only average $1/day, nowhere near $10/day.
And this is why people who travel a lot use local simcards and do all their communication on WhatsApp these days.,
Last time I needed a simcard when in a foreign country it cost me $5, gave me 1GB of data and lasted two weeks.
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Other carriers, such as Verizon, have been offering this exact plan for a while now.
Welcome to the present, AT&T.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
T-Mobile already offers this. once you land in a foreign country you get a courtesy text reminding you that your data plan still works without any surcharge or tariff. Youre also reminded that your text messages remain free, and your voice rate is now very competitively priced.
smh. amazing ATT considers this worth advertising at all.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you are going to be in a country for more than 2 weeks or so, this is a bad deal... for these travelers, it's much less expensive to go thru the hassle of getting a local SIM and number....
But for the majority of travelers, this is a pretty good service... for a week trip or so, it's under $100. Worth it for the convenience of keeping your number and not dealing with putting in a SIM.
I'm not sure why this made it to ./, as VZ has offered it since last summer. Maybe now that most carriers offer international day rates, there will be some competition.
For VZ, in Canada it's $2/day (although may be included in monthly rate depending on your plan).
Not exactly kindness, but way less expensive than the old "surprise you" rates.
Pretty much all the countries I'd be interested in are not on the list.... (sad face)
Wait, Venezuela is on the list but PNG isn't? Heck, most of the middle east isn't on the list but China is?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
...is it true that the cell company Three allows unlimited data when roaming in the US? Has anyone tried using hundreds of gigs of data while traveling here?
This is still a worse deal than just buying a prepaid sim card and putting it in your unlocked phone.
still a ripof
http://fi.google.com
Last time I went to Europe, my Project Fi account did not charge me anything above what I paid here in the US. voice calls were a few cents/minute and data was at the same rate I pay here. My bill for 8 days was about $6 total.
There's no voice, only text and data. Reason voice is excluded has to do with archaic regulations as best as I can tell. Things are changing in that regard so it'll probalby change at some point. However right now you get talk to and from the US, Canada, and Mexico. Everywhere else voice is extra charge. Text and data are available in most countries and are included with no extra charge.
AT&T charging that much for 1 day of service is really crappy. I have been traveling internationally for five months now, T-Mobile is my saving grace. I get unlimited 3g data in every country. From October to January 1 I had unlimited 4g. Tethering my laptop to my phone was nice and easy, all for $95 a month. I think I used 60GB of international data one month after I had a string of hostels with crappy wifi, I didn't pay a cent more than my standard T-mobile One Plus rate. I was waiting for a warning from T-Mobile about how much data I was using, but they didn't contact me. Since that month I have lowered my data usage down to 15GB. T-mobile you Rule!!!!!!!!!!! AT&T you suck, what happened to the SBC days when you were trying to be disruptive?
Yet another illustration that the executives and marketing departments at the major cellular companies are idiots. $10 a day is $300 a month, which is hideously overpriced. It is only good in comparison to the hideous roaming fees that European cellular companies charge. We don't know how good we have it here, where you can travel 2,000 miles using the same cellular provider.
Were I traveling anywhere in the world and could get by with texting. I'd get a DeLorme InReach SE. It's two-way direct-to-satellite texting anywhere in the world and the prices of the plans are quite reasonable. You can even have it send your itinerary and location to a webpage, where you location appears on a map. Or post tweets and to Facebook.
https://www.amazon.com/Delorme-AG-009871-201-DeLorme-inReach-SE/dp/B00BX7TJ2O
I'd say it again. That's send and receive texting anywhere on earth with no messy SIMs. Jungles, mountains, far out at sea... wherever. Great for hiking too, since it doesn't use cellular towers. YouTube has numerous rave reviews of it.
I travel a lot and never use roaming. Most of my stuff comes over the network anyway so I just make sure I have plenty of data. Last time I visited the UK I bought a SIM from 3 for £20 from a machine which came with unlimited calls, text and data. What I didn't realise at the time was it would also work almost anywhere in the world. When I went over to Denmark it connected to 3-DK and worked fine there, Sweden, yep, USA it switched to T-mobile and then I ended up in NZ and it connected to 2degrees. The SIM only worked for 4 weeks but boy did it work.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I'd like to get that $10 flat free. Where do I go to pick it up?
What a rip off. I can get a similar offer here in Australia (which is usually way more expensive than the USA) for $5 a day (~$3.80 USD). Vodafone UK offers a daily roaming option for 3 pounds (also ~$3.80 USD) which suggests that AT&T should be charging around $USD4 not $10.
Or just switch to Google Fi. You get 3G roaming data in something like 120+ countries at the same exact price as domestic 4G data in the US ($10/GB).
Does it also mean you're charged 10 bucks per day if you don't use the service for anything while abroad? Or near border and trigger
the roaming for a second or two although not across it yet?
That's the kind of pricing that you should be paying. The cost of dealing with roamers for the companies are probably in the pennies per day. Those plans are almost 100% profit. The only reason why they get away with it is that "everybody does it" .. and regulators allow them to get away with it because lawmakers are paid off by the companies making these massive profits (earned off of our backs).
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
International plans are only useful if they let you receive calls from your domestic number for emergencies.
In almost any case I've seen, grabbing a cheap local SIM is much better. In Asia, you can usually buy one right at the airport (at a special short-term rate only available for tourists, even). It does require an unlocked phone but that's getting simpler these days as well.
A few years ago, while in the US on holiday my partner and I each bought a prepaid AT&T SIM card for the trip. I was completely amazed at how bad the AT&T network was. Despite full service on both phones, quite often we couldn't call eachother, and family back home couldn't call us either. Restarting the phones didn't help, nor did swapping the SIM's into other phones I had brought with me (I work in the Telco industry, so I took a few spare phones just in case). I would rate it as a mobile network for a 3rd world country, except that I've had better mobile service the 3rd world countries!