In this day and age, most of us feel pretty naked without our cell phones. One of the greatest challenges of traveling is we often have to switch off our phones, even if they do work on overseas networks, the charges for staying connected through email, social networking, and even good old fashion voice calling can be phenomenally high!
More and more wireless carriers are starting to offer travel plans, a flat fee for 'x' amount of roaming, and then a fee of 'y' dollars per min/mb thereafter. This helps to lower the costs, but ultimately you still need to be smart about usage or it can still cost you a small fortune. There's usually 3 types of roaming, packages are usually available for each and sometimes in combination. Voice roaming is the one that most people are familiar with, that's when you're making phone calls. Data roaming comes into play when you access your email, your social networking, and web. If you have a Blackberry, bbm will also fall under this. Then there's text roaming, which few people think about but I think has the most value.
I don't talk on the phone personally, I rather loathe it. But I can see how it's a necessity to some, I'm not talking about gabbing with your girlfriends while you're away, but maybe you have an elderly family member at home that you need to check up on. Instances like that you need the voice roaming. If that's not the case though, think carefully under want circumstances you might need to make a call with your phone. And of those circumstances how often will you need to exchange more than a few words? For example, if you're traveling with friends or meeting up with someone in another country, will you be able to coordinate a meet-up spot via text messaging?
Web browsing and social networking on our phones is pretty essential to many of us when at home, but our monthly packages come with large buckets of data where data roaming packages won't. The amount of web surfing and tweeting you're accustomed to may cost you dearly overseas. Really stop and consider how much tweeting/surfing/foursquare-ing you really need to do. Most hotels offer free or cheap wifi, so provided you print a few good maps before you leave and do all your additional research and social networking at the hotel, you shouldn't really be needing too much data while you're out taking in the sights.
At first texting (SMS-ing) seems pretty useless compared to the other two right? Well, think again. Text roaming packages usually come with a good number of included texts, and additional texts are rarely over 50 cents each. If your msg is concise you can get your point across in one message rather than take a minute of voice time, which would cost you at least twice as much than sending one text msg. Also you can do more that just direct message someone using SMS. Did you know you can Tweet via SMS? Blog via SMS? Get transit prediction info via SMS in some cities? Most advertisements featuring scan barcodes for your smartphone will also include in the fine print below, a method for those who don't have smartphones to send an SMS message instead to receive more info.
So next time you're assessing your wireless roaming needs, keep those text roaming packages in mind!
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