We’ve posted before about how easy it is to rack up gigantic cell phone bills when traveling abroad. It can be especially scary with an iPhone that’s fetching data every time you turn around. Open an email with a photo attached, or download a 3-minute video clip from YouTube, and you could be looking at a charge of almost $80. AT&T, iPhone’s carrier, has posted a tip sheet on its website for customers heading into international territory—which means outside the US, Puerto Rico, and US Virgin Islands. It lists five steps to take to keep your bill from getting out of control, including turning off data roaming and “fetch new data,” and using wi-fi hotspots instead of 3G/GPRS/EDGE networks. Not able to go cold turkey? Reset the iPhone’s usage tracker to zero when you arrive overseas, so at least you’ll be able to get an estimate of your usage. If you’ll be overseas for an extended period of time, consider purchasing an international data package, which starts at $24.99 a month for 20MB of data usage.
On a recent family trip to Aruba, we followed AT&T’s suggestions to turn off data roaming and fetching. Thanks to the in-room wi-fi access at our resort, we were able to use our laptop to check e-mail and get on the Internet. Two text messages arrived on the last day of our stay, which rang in at 50 cents a pop. But other than that, we ended up with a cell phone bill that looked like we never left home. And that was a nice souvenir.
