smart phone text and data

Hi Anita,

I'm not savvy enough to answer your question, but what wireless network company did you join? I'm thinking that could help answer the question. Tx!

TMobile 55+ plan

Personally , I wouldn’t drive yourself to techie insanity. The calls are billed at $.20 per minute so if you keep your calls short and inform folks that you’re on vacation your charges should be fairly low. In relation to the cost of a trip to Europe, $20-30 would be fairly insignificant. I’m not sure but you might be able to disable voice mail while you’re away.

Do your iPhone's support WiFi Calling? That means you can make/receive calls while on WiFi (for example, if you lived in a place with no cell signal but good internet). T-Mobile offers it for free; call WiFi calls to US numbers are free, even overseas. So you should, I believe, be able to check voicemail for free while on WiFi. Call T-Mobile customer service to check into this.

Otherwise, you could always install the Google Hangouts app, which lets you make calls for free to US numbers. You might install this so you can check voicemail for free even while not on WiFi (Hangouts uses WiFi or mobile data - or rather, it doesn't use voice time so no 20 cents/minute fee, and your T-Mobile roaming data is free). Then you'd check your voicemail by calling your own cell number with Hangouts (you may have to add a +1 in front of the number, but with T-Mobile, I doubt it). Because your phone will in fact ring when you do this, could be it's best to call your number to check voicemail from the other iPhone (if you have two phones) to make it less confusing. Anyway...call your own number with Hangouts for free, and once you get your own voicemail greeting while calling yourself, you hit a key (* or #) to interrupt the greeting and enter your passcode so you can access voicemail.

Thank you for the advice. Let me be more clear that we don't plan to make many calls and I do not want to receive calls or voice mails on my phone. Unfortunately, over the years I've sometimes needed to reach business clients after office hours and used my personal cellphone. Clients have saved and use that cell number when they can't immediately reach me in the office. So, during foreign travel I plan to forward my cell number back my office landline which will be monitored by coworkers. Friends and family will know to text or to call my husband's cell phone.

My question is whether my strategy will actually work. Will forwarding calls back to a US landline prevent me from being charged for calls and voicemails? Will that prevent me from getting text messages? Last question, how well does the Maps function work in Europe? We plan to use Maps as we drive through rural parts of France. Thanks in advance for your experience and expertise.

T-Mobile's free international roaming is 2G only. In some countries and big cities, the speed for Google Maps can range from good to slow but tolerable. But it can be unbearable in some countries, or outside the big cities. I have experienced both. Consider an additional $10/line/month for the One Plus Plan, which gives you "2x the data speed abroad".

https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone-plans?icid=WMM_TM_Q117TMO1PL_2SADAX76BBT7513

Should the speed be a real problem, I would add a local sim to my dual sim phone. A local sim can be very inexpensive, and a good value for fixing such a problem.

I have the same plan. You will get charged for calls you make including a call to check your voicemail. If the calls you receive are forwarded to your office then you won't be charged because they are not actually going outside the country. It would be the same as if you forwarded everything and you were still home. If you don't make or receive a call outside the U.S., no charges. When you forward calls, you are not first receving them on your handset, you are telling T-mobile to forward them to another number rather than sending them to your phone.

I have received voicemail messages while overseas, saw they were from telemarketers and never bothered listening to them. No charges.

By the way, if you haven't used your phone overseas yet, make sure data roaming is turned on otherwise you won't be able to use texting or data. (I recently got a new phone and checked with T-mobile tech support that it was all I needed to do. It was and they actually reminded me that to save money on calls I could use wifi calling. That was surprising....they told me how to save money.)

I’ve used T-Mobile’s service on 2 separate European trips in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. About 60% of the time I was on 4LTE, 30% on 3G and 10% on 2G. I’ve used Google Maps, Apple and Waze. They all worked fine and I retired my GPS. I prefer Waze because it gives more information about road conditions. I haven’t used Waze in France but in Italy it also warns about speed cameras which are also prevalent in France.

I’ve used T-Mobile’s service on 2 separate European trips in France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. About 60% of the time I was on 4LTE, 30% on 3G and 10% on 2G. I’ve used Google Maps, Apple and Waze. They all worked fine and I retired my GPS. I prefer Waze because it gives more information about road conditions. I haven’t used Waze in France but in Italy it also warns about speed cameras which are also prevalent in France.

With T-Mobile overseas, your phone will always connect to the fastest available network on a roaming partner - could always be 4GLTE.

The "2G data" that is mentioned refers to "throttling" they do to slow it down, no matter what speed of data network you are connected to.

Thank you to everyone who responded. You've all given me information I didn't have and it is much appreciated. If there are more TMobile or smart phone in Europe tips to share, please keep them coming.