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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.
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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.
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.
A flat free? But what if I want a flat expensive?
Read between the parts you bolded: "each time they travel to a supported country." So, no, it does not mean you keep paying after you return.
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!)
It only kicks in while you are traveling in the other country. It's not something you're continuously billed. Not that it isn't still a ripoff, but you don't need to falsely exaggerate to prove that point.
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.
Well, how about "they are using arbitrarily carrier-locked phones to fuck you into using their price-gouging international rates instead of just allowing you to get a prepaid SIM in whatever country you visit"
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.
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Evil? Nah. Totally dickish? You bet!
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 go over your cap, the overage rate you pay will be the same as if you incurred the overage in the US.
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If you have international roaming enabled you will get a charge of $10 per device per day (versus the standard international charges). If you have international roaming disabled (most phones only allow data roaming to be disabled), it will not connect to the other country's base station.
sudo mod me up
Only if you're traveling in the country for a 30 day stretch.
You are exaggerating. You don't get billed $300 every month.
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?
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Do your homework, your worldphone only works consistently on T-Moblie and AT&T networks in the USA.
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...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?
Yes. I haven't tried "hundreds of gigs" but I've used Maps, email etc. freely and haven't incurred any charges. Only gotcha is that calling a US phone still counts as an international call from the UK.
I think there's a time limit on how many weeks you can use it for in one run, so there's no point trying the old "Hi dude... er, sorry, hello old chaps at Three I am and genuine lime... sorry... British person (I say, what ho, God Bless the Queen, poh-tay-to, al-you-min-y-um and all that) and can I get... er... I want to pur-chase one of your fine SIMS for use here at my home in Londonengland..." routine.
I'm paying £20/month for 200 minutes and unlimited data.... I think its a bit more now for new customers (I got grandfathered).
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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.
Let us say I want to travel to Europe for two weeks. That's $140 just for them to not charge me insane rates. On top of that I pay their usual $8 per gigabyte. Let's say I just want to use navigation and download a couple of PDFs. Say 2GB total. Their price: $156 for that trip! With something like Google Fi I will pay an extra $20 for that trip.
It's overpriced.
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.
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I'd like to get that $10 flat free. Where do I go to pick it up?
say that you're travelling to finland..
a month of unlimited 3g/4g is about 10 bucks with a local sim.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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).
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).
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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.
Or better still, "They are an increasingly unregulated bloated bureaucracy that can't survive without statutory advantages which allow them to gouge from consumers who don't understand that telco regulation exists for a reason, and it's not to stifle innovation, it's to restrict disadvantaging the customers in a very slanted business environment"
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