Roger Fingas
T-Mobile U.S. on Thursday announced that, thanks to new deals with regional carriers, Simple Choice plan subscribers will soon have access to free voice, text, and LTE data roaming while visiting Canada or Mexico.
The change is due to take effect July 15, and will apply to both prepaid and post-paid subscribers, the carrier said. Businesses will have the feature free for their first 10 lines, but pay $1 per month for each line past that point.
LTE coverage will be available in 30 Canadian cities, such as Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Saskatoon, St. Johns, Toronto, and Vancouver. In Mexico the list is 100, with notable locations such as Acapulco, Cancun, Cozumel, Guadalajara, Mexico City, and Veracruz.
U.S. carriers normally charge extra for roaming in North America. Without buying special travel packages, people can easily rack up hundreds or even thousands of dollars in service fees.
To better compete with leading carriers AT&T and Verizon, T-Mobile has been making aggressive upgrades to its subscription plans in the past few years, for instance introducing Data Stash, which rolls over unused data from month to month. Some of these additions have forced rivals carriers to adapt to maintain an edge.
Christine McKee
Andrew Orr
Charles Martin
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
15 Comments
This is similar to roaming services across the European Union. But still, it makes you question how often do you travel to Mexico or Canada. Is it worth saving $25 to $30 in annual international roaming charges to put up with swiss-cheese coverage in the US?
We're booked for July 17-20 travel in Canada. The timing couldn't be better. We also had good inexpensive coverage in Japan earlier this year; especially nice was no stomach acid over whether we might accidentally get hit with some "out-of-network" roaming charges, which didn't happen. And we may be going to Mexico later this year or next year. Our T-Mobile coverage here in NW Washington state is adequate, and we have LTE at 50-60Mbps at home (not needed) and in many public areas, such as malls and their parking lots. Yes, when you get out in the sticks coverage can get pretty bad, with 2G data, but for our usual patterns of use, which include Canada and Japan, T-Mobile is excellent value. Getting excellenter :-)
That's a better deal than my CDN carrier gives me in Canada. I'm wondering what CDN carrier they use ? Two of our carriers have very good coverage, with one slightly superior, the third has worse coverage. Of course with our significant regions with little or no population, coverage in those regions likely is none !
This is similar to roaming services across the European Union.
But still, it makes you question how often do you travel to Mexico or Canada. Is it worth saving $25 to $30 in annual international roaming charges to put up with swiss-cheese coverage in the US?
Actually it does. I used to be with ATT. I switched to T-Mobile. My data plan costs reduced by $40 /month. And my international charges by $30 /month. That's $70 /month. And yes, I was in Canada on a monthly basis. Not to mention my European travels this past year.
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for AT&T to offer wifi calling, which they said would be available with iOS 7. Hey, Ma Bell, iOS 8 launches in two months. Get the lead out.