roaming

G1 owner gets hit with $102.85 in roaming charges

Android Guys has a story today from a T-Mobile G1 owner who got charged for $102.85 in roaming charges--even after he turned off data roaming on his phone. The story goes that he was visiting the U.K., and knowing that he would rack up high data-roaming charges while abroad, he turned off data roaming, data sync, and 3G on the phone (Though he did still use it for calls and texts under an international calling plan).

Turns out, of course, that it didn't work so well. When asked about it, T-Mobile customer service told him that the … Read more

Europe seeks to save us from death by roaming charges

If you've traveled internationally, you know that airfare is often the cheapest part of the trip. The big ticket item, oddly enough, is often roaming charges. Last year I was hit with a $1,450 bill for fewer than three hours of online time in Canada. Others have been hit with far worse.

It's therefore gratifying to read in Ars Technica that the European Commission, which has taken on Microsoft and others, has turned its attention to the abusive roaming charges that wireless carriers inflict on consumers.

According to the European Commission, citizens are charged an average price … Read more

Europe reduces cap on voice-roaming prices

The European Commission has lowered the price ceiling for roaming voice calls.

Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding announced on Friday that starting August 30 the price cap for roaming calls on mobile phones would be reduced from 0.49 euros (72 cents) to 0.46 euros per minute (excluding value-added tax) for making a call, and from 0.24 euros to 0.22 euros per minute (excluding VAT) for receiving a call, while in another EU country.

The price reductions are due to the EU's Roaming Regulation, adopted by the Commission in 2007 to "curb the excessive roaming … Read more

AT&T adds to international data plans

AT&T added to its existing international roaming packages Monday with a new plan for smartphone users. The package will feature 50 megabytes of data in 67 countries for $60 per month. That's in addition to your normal voice and data plan and any roaming plan for international voice calls.

To help keep track of AT&T's various offerings, the carrier also launched an AT&T Travel Guide where you can input your international itinerary and get specific roaming rates.

Besides the new smartphone plan, AT&T offers other packages for data use while … Read more

Vysr launches developer platform

Vysr RoamAbout, a browser add-on for contextual search that launched earlier this year at the Web 2.0 Expo, is opening up its service for developers Monday morning.

Vysr founder and CEO Guda Venkatesh says he wants the platform to be a veritable (and ultimately profitable) sandbox for developers.

The add-on tucks a small sidebar in the corner of your browser, letting you highlight text and quickly search various Web services to find out more--all without leaving the page.

Lately, I've seen a few publishing services that let content creators do this (see Apture and Zemanta) , but Vysr's … Read more

AT&T Wireless is gouging customers on international roaming charges

I've written before about AT&T Wireless' terrible international roaming rates for the iPhone. Well, imagine my surprise to discover that its roaming rates for its wireless cards is even worse. How much worse? Consider the bill I received from AT&T today:

Yes, that's really $1520.76 for one month's usage of my wireless card. But the shocking thing is that $1450.19 of it came from using the card for under three hours to pull down a total of 96 megabytes of data. That's roughly $15 per megabyte. What a bargain!

Given … Read more

iPhone data plans go international

AT&T is now offering iPhone owners international data plans designed to give discounted rates to 29 countries In North America, Australasia, and Europe (see AT&T's Web site for a complete list). The plans are designed for iPhone users who travel frequently outside the United States, the U.S. Virgin islands and Puerto Rico, where iPhone data use is unlimited.

For $24.99 per month, you can get 20MB of data use in the select group of nations while $59.99 will get you 50MB of data use. The overage rate for either plan is $0.… Read more

Use Whisher to treat anyone's Wi-Fi like it's your own

There's a new Wi-Fi sharing service launching at Demo 07: Whisher. This service competes with Fon, but has a very different architecture. (See News.com story.)

Fon asks its customers to install Fon-powered Wi-Fi access points on their broadband connections, and it makes them all into a global shared network. Whisher, by contrast, collects the access keys to the existing routers that its subscribers already use. In other words, to put your broadband connection on the Whisher network, you give the service your Wi-Fi access point's ID and security code (WEP or WPA key), and then Whisher holds … Read more

Samsung phone works in 90 countries

Auto-roaming around the globe may finally be getting closer.

ZDNet Korea, one of our sister sites, says a new phone released by Samsung on the SK Telecom network can handle CDMA, European GSM and Japan's JCDMA standards. That means the SCH-V920 pretty much works in Asia, Australia, North America and South America. You'd be out of luck in Gabon, but for most business trips or vacations you wouldn't have to worry about renting a phone at the airport.

The $500 phone also comes with an MP3 player, a 1.3-megapixel camera and an electronic translator that can … Read more