From Canada , need cellphone plan for travel ?

disneyred

DIS Veteran
Joined
Jun 20, 2005
Hello.
its been a while since needing a cellphone for extended travel.. for USA travel and Hawaii.
what is the best and cheapest option.
a while back , i used Rogers / FIDO travel package...but now I noticed the price are 7$ perday!
YIKes, using it for a day here or there OK.. but for extended time.. its just so costly.
We have several unlocked iphones and would like to know best option? Should something be
set up before leaving Canada? or for example when landing in Hawaii... what and where is best option to do ?? do you know what prices we would be paying?? looking for talk and bit of data?
thanks for any tips!
 
Check out "Roam Mobility". They are a Canadian company that partner with T-Mobile in the USA. You can purchase the sim card in Canada and put it into an unlocked phone before you leave. They have daily as well as monthly plans. In March of this year we purchased a monthly plan for $39.99 Canadian that covered us from March 1 to March 31. There was some data (1 or 2 gig) as well as unlimited Canada/US Calling. They have coverage maps on their website that you can check out to see if they have coverage in the areas that you are traveling through.
 
I wouldn't completely pass over Rogers Roam Like Home package - and yes, it must be setup on your line before you go.

I was a Roam Mobility user for a couple of years before Rogers introduced RLH and it would be my standby. And yes, RLH prices have increased considerably in the last couple of years (used to be $5 for a max of 10 days in the billing period, now $7 for a max of 15; $105 maximum per billing period). Still i really like to convenience of not having my phone number change or having to swap out SIM cards, and the unlock process for the phone used to be a little risky. Not as bad now that the carriers will do it for you for free, but my current handset is still locked. Also, Rogers will roam on both ATT and T-Mobile when travelling which gives me much better coverage than I was getting with Roam Mobility (on T-Mobile network only).

I do like that I get access to all my own data and services. As we have 5 lines on our Share Everything, I have access to way more data than I ever use in a month. We usually only have one device roaming (my phone; the others go in airplane mode, but have wi-fi), but if we need two phones, say we split for a day of shopping, then DW or the kid's can enable their phone for only $7 for the day so we can coordinate pickups etc. It is somewhat more than Roam Mobility, but the convenience is worth it to me.

Take a look at if the numbers and convenience work for you before counting out staying with your own provider. My DSis tells me that Bell has also introduced similar packages for travelers now.

Note that prior to Roam Mobility, I used to purchase a burner phone or sim card locally, but that never worked well, I would not recommend at all.
 
I’ve used both Roam and Telaway and had really good success with them. Telaway was by far our best deal on a 25 day trip but on shorter trips Roam is better and your SIM can be reused on subsequent trips as long as it’s used once a year (you can add one day on the cheapest plan to keep it active you don’t actually have to be in the US at all)
 


I'm actually going to be trying out Roam's "lite" monthly ($40 for phone, text and 1GB data) in August. Getting it because of our road trip to WDW/Universal, but as an added "bonus" (so to speak) my cruise falls within the same calendar month so I can get some usage while in FLL.

Looking at Telaway it's a better deal than Roam if you need a monthly plan of more than 1GB. I'm going to try and leech off of wifi as much as I can though so we'll see how successful I am with that.
 
thanks for everyone's input.. it great to hear the experiences here .. i will look into all the optons mentioned here...at
first glance ... i just thought that 7/ day was too much to spend if there was much cheaper options out there... just did not know if
i had to do set up before I left Canada or not.
 
When I was in the US I looked into AT&T month plan. I think it was $40. I also think the $7/day is BS :sad2:

I don’t know when it went up to $7.00? Thought it was $6.00 not very long ago. They just keep on upping the rate.
It was a good deal at $5/10 days. Then went to $6/15 days. Now $7.00 :scared: sheesh. Pretty soon it will go to 20 days like Virgin. Bunch of thieves.
 


When I was in the US I looked into AT&T month plan. I think it was $40. I also think the $7/day is BS :sad2:

I don’t know when it went up to $7.00? Thought it was $6.00 not very long ago. They just keep on upping the rate.
It was a good deal at $5/10 days. Then went to $6/15 days. Now $7.00 :scared: sheesh. Pretty soon it will go to 20 days like Virgin. Bunch of thieves.
I agree , if the trip is about 14 days (thats 14 x7) = 98.00 per phone.....
 
When I was in the US I looked into AT&T month plan. I think it was $40. I also think the $7/day is BS :sad2:

I don’t know when it went up to $7.00? Thought it was $6.00 not very long ago. They just keep on upping the rate.
It was a good deal at $5/10 days. Then went to $6/15 days. Now $7.00 :scared: sheesh. Pretty soon it will go to 20 days like Virgin. Bunch of thieves.
I think the original price was $5/10 to bring back the users like me who had switched to ROAM. And it worked. Rogers did the first hike at the same time that ROAM hiked their rate as well. One thing for perspective is that this is still a heck of a lot cheaper than the old travel packs that Rogers used to have.

I have done the US carrier thing many ways over the years, and am willing to pay a bit more for the privilege of having my phone just work. Nothing to do but arrive in Orlando.

With a US carrier, you have to make a stop at cellular store of some sort, purchase a SIM if your phone is unlocked, or a burner phone if not, this is time away from vacation stuff. Then you have to pray that everything works as it should; it doesn't always. One trip the international dialing (i.e. back home to Canada) didn't work after the 48 hours wait period as it should have. Phone calls to support took more vacation time away. I finally got my first call back home while sitting at the airport waiting for my return flight. Then there is the issue of phone numbers. With ROAM I did have the ability to forward my cell number to my ROAM number just before swapping SIMs at the border or airport so I could still receive calls from home. If you buy the phone/SIM down there, you have to roam on your Canadian number at least long enough to turn on call forward, or you need to email all of your contacts back home with your "new" US number to use this week while you are on vacation. There is a bunch of stuff to do with a US phone that I just don't have to with my own cell phone, and vacation time is BIG money to me (figure out what your $6000 family vacation comes to per hour; I get about $47/hr allowing 6 hours sleep per night). If I spend a bit more than hour getting my cell setup, I have already burned my savings.
 
I think the original price was $5/10 to bring back the users like me who had switched to ROAM. And it worked. Rogers did the first hike at the same time that ROAM hiked their rate as well. One thing for perspective is that this is still a heck of a lot cheaper than the old travel packs that Rogers used to have.

I have done the US carrier thing many ways over the years, and am willing to pay a bit more for the privilege of having my phone just work. Nothing to do but arrive in Orlando.

With a US carrier, you have to make a stop at cellular store of some sort, purchase a SIM if your phone is unlocked, or a burner phone if not, this is time away from vacation stuff. Then you have to pray that everything works as it should; it doesn't always. One trip the international dialing (i.e. back home to Canada) didn't work after the 48 hours wait period as it should have. Phone calls to support took more vacation time away. I finally got my first call back home while sitting at the airport waiting for my return flight. Then there is the issue of phone numbers. With ROAM I did have the ability to forward my cell number to my ROAM number just before swapping SIMs at the border or airport so I could still receive calls from home. If you buy the phone/SIM down there, you have to roam on your Canadian number at least long enough to turn on call forward, or you need to email all of your contacts back home with your "new" US number to use this week while you are on vacation. There is a bunch of stuff to do with a US phone that I just don't have to with my own cell phone, and vacation time is BIG money to me (figure out what your $6000 family vacation comes to per hour; I get about $47/hr allowing 6 hours sleep per night). If I spend a bit more than hour getting my cell setup, I have already burned my savings.
Which is why I have always used travel packs, because I have friends and family in Florida plus my mom is in an ALS home and all the medical team there needs my #. It’s a pain for me to switch #s I’m usually in Florida a month Aug/Sept. I start off in Ft. Lauderdale and there 10-12 days (sort of a working vacay) to see my mom, etc. before heading up to WDW.

At Telus I used to get a decent customer retention roaming plan, then switched to Rogers with their RLH package.
My phone is unlocked, and I’m getting annoyed with the constant rate hikes. It’s tempting to get a US sim. I did check out AT&T when I was doing some cross border shopping the other week :rolleyes: but as you pointed out, it is a huge pain to change #s. What carrier did you go with when you had those problems?
Ugh. This wouldn’t be a problem if I went somewhere where I didn’t know anyone, lol.
 
What carrier did you go with when you had those problems?

Was afraid you would ask that. It was at least 6-7 years ago now (maybe more). Probably TracPhone or Net10. I would generally buy a burner pay-as-you go phone from the B-brand carrier of the big brands. I'm pretty sure this was a T-Mobile hanger on. I do remember the customer support centre had to offshore because I could barely understand/be understood by the customer service rep. I should probably go home and pull the shell out of my bag of burner phones in the closet to confirm the carrier. With all of the consolidation though, many of the carriers have merged.

My general feeling after several years of trying to grab a phone down there (or unlocking my phone and grabbing a SIM) is that it was never easy and seamless; be it because their system would not accept a Canadian credit card or address, or services were difficult to setup, or finding an outlet with a phone in stock was difficult (one year DW and I had different handsets because that's all the stock they had at the big box store), it just never went as easily as I would have liked. I also managed to brick my Rogers data stick when I tried to unlock it a few years ago. That was a costly $100 for an experiment gone wrong; just glad it wasn't my smart phone.
 
Was afraid you would ask that. It was at least 6-7 years ago now (maybe more). Probably TracPhone or Net10. I would generally buy a burner pay-as-you go phone from the B-brand carrier of the big brands. I'm pretty sure this was a T-Mobile hanger on. I do remember the customer support centre had to offshore because I could barely understand/be understood by the customer service rep. I should probably go home and pull the shell out of my bag of burner phones in the closet to confirm the carrier. With all of the consolidation though, many of the carriers have merged.

My general feeling after several years of trying to grab a phone down there (or unlocking my phone and grabbing a SIM) is that it was never easy and seamless; be it because their system would not accept a Canadian credit card or address, or services were difficult to setup, or finding an outlet with a phone in stock was difficult (one year DW and I had different handsets because that's all the stock they had at the big box store), it just never went as easily as I would have liked. I also managed to brick my Rogers data stick when I tried to unlock it a few years ago. That was a costly $100 for an experiment gone wrong; just glad it wasn't my smart phone.

Ah! That would probably explain the difficulties! If I get a US sim I’d go with AT&T. I think it would go smoother. But jury still out because it is a pain changing phone #. You pay for the convenience to be sure.

I just switched my billing date so I’d be in 1 billing cycle for trips. It used to be 1st of the month, but most of my trips start mid month. At least now my roaming will be covered on 1 billing cycle, instead of resetting, and starting the 15 days again on next billing cycle.
What BS that is! Roaming should start when you leave and continue for 30 days like the old Roaming Pass. Ugh.
 
It was $6 a day just a couple of weeks ago! I used FIDO roam on April 13 & 14 and again on the 22 & 23rd. A friend used Rogers roam the same dates and it also cost him $6 a day.
 

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