T-Mobile Pay as You Go (Roaming Works, but$$$)

[thebear]

Hello folks,

I am a newbie to the forum. I have been visiting this site on a weekly basis for a very long time . I always wanted to know if T-mobile pay as you go would actually fully function roaming oversees.

Well last year I visited Saudi Arabia with my same tmobile pay as you go sim card and the line never registered with any of the local carriers. This year i flew in for a few months and as I switched on my phone at the airport, 20 minutes later I get an SMS and a call from my brother in the states, texas to be exact. I was caught off guard that my phone registered to Mobily-Etisalat, which is one of the local carriers.

I also tried to register with STC (Saudi Telecom) and the sim worked. However, the rates were very high. I ended up using my local STC sim card in the Kingdom.

In addition to sharing this with you all, did tmobile change their roaming coverage for pay as you go?

[RTuesday]

Originally Posted by thebear

did tmobile change their roaming coverage for pay as you go?

I think it was sometime last year T-Mobile prepaid US added a lot of extra roaming countries, here's a list (pdf):
http://wac.04c7.edgecastcdn.net/0004...llingRates.pdf

(the UK is missing, but somebody reported it works there as well, at the same 1.49/min rate as other western European countries).

At 2.99/min you picked one of the more expensive countries to test in! Good thing it wasn't Vietnam or Kenya! (5.99/min).

The roaming is expensive but I think it's one of the few, if not the only, US prepaid that roams in Europe and Asia, and if you're mainly receiving texts it's fine. For example, if you've set up a US credit card to send text alerts when your card is used, it's very useful to be able to get those while overseas!

[thebear]

Thanks a bunch for the link. Never saw that before. And you are right, it is very expensive. I was topped up at $140.00 and I went down to $78.00 in matter of 9 days, which is when i popped the tmobile sim out.

I have a friend who lives in the States that has a local Saudi sim from Mobily Etisalat and he advised that I check in with the local Mobily store and I can get a cheap post paid package and pay the roaming deposit of 200 bucks and all incoming calls are free (not free due to the deposit, but unlimited) while roaming any where in the world, which is true since my friend would get loads of calls on his Saudi number in the states.

I may look into that.

[Bossman]

Thanks to my tmobille payg sim when I visited Montego Bay, Jamaica in July. My Telna sim was not functioning...calls were not reaching me but I was getting charged. I quickly changed my forwarding to the tmobile sim. Only used a total of 6 minutes of incoming though. Used voip for outgoing calls, since the resort has WiFi.

[RTuesday]

Originally Posted by thebear

I have a friend who lives in the States that has a local Saudi sim from Mobily Etisalat and he advised that I check in with the local Mobily store and I can get a cheap post paid package and pay the roaming deposit of 200 bucks and all incoming calls are free (not free due to the deposit, but unlimited) while roaming any where in the world, which is true since my friend would get loads of calls on his Saudi number in the states.

Looks like incoming roaming in the US from Mobily Etisalat is only free for postpaid customers when roaming on T-Mobile:
http://www.mobily.com.sa/portalu/wps...etPortlet=true

Unusual rates, as they are different for each carrier you could roam on. There are some other free incoming countries (UK, Netherlands etc) but not every country is free (examples: Canada, Australia, even UAE when using one carrier).