AT&T International Calling Plan

Hi Maggie. For my cell phone I use the AT&T World Traveler calling plan (not sure if this is the same thing). Calls cost $1 per minute and texts are 50 cents, I think. It costs about $7 per month but as far as I know, there's no limit on talk and text. You pay the $7 per month (I believe they pro-rate it but again am not sure; I haven't used it since last fall) and add each call and text. It's a great deal.

Hi Maggie, how much talking do you think you will need to do? You can use your phone without purchasing the international plan. Text messages are 25 cents to send and receive, free to receive if the sender has ATT. We only used the phones when we had to and kept the conversations short. My phone bill is usually $10-15 extra per week when I do this. I think the international plan is not worth it.

I have not had personal experience with this, as I have an Italian cell phone and when I travel to other countries I just buy a SIM for there. However, from what I have seen others experience, just be careful to make sure that your current phone on which you'll be activating this plan has the capabilities to work on European cell networks. I think it must be a "quad band" phone, but someone with more technical expertise will have to weigh in on that. The bottom line is, Europe has basically the same categories of phone and data signals (2g, 3g, 4g/equivalent, etc.) as we do in the States, but they broadcast them at different frequencies. Your phone has to be able to receive the signals at the different frequency ranges. This might seem like a non-issue if you have a phone that you bought fairly recently, but let me hasten to add that last summer when I was home in the States I dumped a couple hundred bucks on a brand new Samsung that was 4g capable in the United States. When I put my Italian SIM card in it upon returning here I could not get faster than a 2g data signal on it. Come to find out, this phone, even though it was a brand new android phone with many bells and whistles, was not capable of receiving the higher signal frequencies in Europe. Since then I have gotten a Google Phone and that has solved all these problems.

Thanks for the info! The phone is quad-band, gsm, yada-yada-blah (it's like there's a separate language for this nonsense!). I've used it in Europe before (with an Irish SIM) so I at least know it works there. Good to know that people have used AT&T without coming home to massive bills. I would suspect we'll use 20 minutes of less for talking and less than a dozen texts.

I am somewhat familiar with the plan, we looked at it on previous trips, but opted just to use international roaming. Seems like the plan got you down to $1.00 a minute, roaming was only $1.25 a minute. Given that we only used the phone for quick calls to check in back home, it was not worth the hassle to get the plan, or an Italian SIM. If your use will be heavier, then the SIM card is probably the way to go. I would verify this with ATT, and this only applies to voice rates. If you have a smart phone, then make sure you switch data off (my phone does this automatically when I go international) For data, get a plan over there. It generally is data that gets people into trouble with huge phone bills.

We have AT&T and used their International Plan as it was 8in 2010 for 3-week trip to Italy. Cost to sign up was around $5. Calls were .99 a minute and I don't recall what the charge for texts was, but we did use texting to update plans without daughters who wer traveling withus, and also called restaurants for reservations, etc. our phone bills was $30 higher than usual that month. Not bad.