Gadling

Great advice. My sons drove the alcan a few weeks ago and roaming on Tmobile for voice was almost $5/ minute. Thankfully they listened when I told them not to use it much.

The Hotspot@Home didn't help as much as we had hoped. Most of the hotels they stayed at had wifi included in the room rate but required logging into an access portal that used flash, so even the blackberry curve couldn't use it. If you don't have the $10 T-mobile Hotspot@Home service your usage will come out of your plan minutes as if you were home UNLESS your phone should switch to gsm (default settings on most UMA phones is to automatically switch to the stronger signal) in which case international roaming should apply, but the billing system may not catch it. With the blackberry you can set the usage to wifi (UMA) only to avoid that.

Text messages can quickly snowball too. The cost for an international texting with tmobile from canada is .45/text unless you have a plan that includes texting. If you have a plan, each text is taken out of the "text bucket". I talked with several customer service reps who didn't know the details. The first (only correct one) said with plan it was covered like texts and pic messages within the US and if you exhausted "bucket" then the .45 rate would kick in. Not trusting one rep I called and tried to confirm with another and had more than one rep tell me all texts would cost .45. Unless the charges for text roaming takes longer to hit than voice, the bucket applies same as in US.

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