Hey Travelers, Has anyone used their Xfinity service in Turkey? Their website says it will work however two years ago they said it would work in Bosnia it did not. Luckly for us my travel buddy uses T-Mobile and that worked. So, I have a couple of months and I'm trying to decide if I should change plans. Thank you much J
Posted by
California
786 posts
I have Xfinity phone and it has been a pain and very expensive to use it abroad, so I opted for using eSIM instead. Which comes out much cheaper. And I can enable voice over wifi and still able to receive phone calls to my home/US cell number when abroad using data from eSIM.
Are you moving to Turkey? I wouldn't switch plans just for a trip.
Posted by
West Michigan
837 posts
Hi Joanne, I don't know much about Xfinity, but here's a few thoughts.
First, you need to read all the fine print details about your specific Xfinity plan. Does it include international roaming? If so, does it include Turkey? Do you need to buy an add-on for a month of international service? If so, how much. And how much do calls cost per minute, and how much are texts.
Do you really need/want, to have your normal phone number to work? If so, there are two ways to do that. One is to use your Xfinity plan if you can. The other is to use Wifi Calling (this assumes your phone and Xfinity both support wifi calling). Many folks here use things like Whatsapp, or TextNow, or Google Voice to make calls and texts using wifi or cell data, but it would not be your normal cell number.
If you need or want a better deal for data, then esims are a great deal, usually very cheap. BUT your phone must be unlocked to use an esim. And your phone must support esim. Most esims are just data, and can be as cheap as $1.50/Gigabyte. Lots of sources for esims, Airalo, Roamless, etc... Fairly easy to download an esim provider's app, make an account, and download an esim. But it would be a good idea to do this a few weeks early to be sure you can get everything to work before you leave.
If you have a recent iPhone, you can do a trick where you have a data esim, and use sort of wifi calling to use your esim for the data and call using your Xfinity plan on Wifi calling. This clever option is not available for my Samsung (Android) phone, unfortunately.
If Xfinity says it will work in Turkey and it doesn't, there are a few settings that may need to be changed. Such as enabling roaming, enabling cell data, selecting "Automatic Selection" for the Network Operator (or rarely, to manually select a network). And if your phone is very old, it may not cover some frequency bands needed in Europe, so you seem to have no coverage in some places.