Cell service while travelling abroad?

[Kevin Slater]

How does an American escort deal with cell phone service while visiting Canada? Do I need a local number for prospective clients to call (i.e. is it prohibitively expensive for Canadians to call a U.S. number)? My carrier will charge me 20 cents a minute for calls and 20 cents per text-- not bad but is there a better way whereby I won't be concerned with long conversations? If this plays in to the answer, I'm with Sprint which doesn't use SIM cards.

 

Thanks for any advice you can give.

 

Kevin Slater

[Mark Gordon]

It is not particularly expensive for Canadians to call a US number, nor vice versa. Clients won't be put off by it. People routinely use their home cell numbers when travelling between the 2 countries. It's not worth the hassle of getting a local pay-as-you-go number for a stay of a few days. Also, it sounds like your phone couldn't accomodate a local SIM anyway. Most of your communication will be by email and very few serious clients will need to talk for more than a few minutes. I always use my Canadian cell number when travelling in the US and see that visiting American escorts do the same when here.

[Kevin Slater]

Thanks for all your help in this and my previous thread, Mark. And I would love to grab that beer you mention in the other post!

 

Kevin Slater

[+ ArVaGuy]

Kevin,

 

Make sure to contact your carrier and have your account updated for a full North America coverage plan. Double check rates and service costs related to roaming all this can get pro rated for the dates of your trip.

 

While rare you can wind up with unexpected issues. On one trip to Vancouver my phone worked just fine for a few days and then went haywire. I could place calls but not recieve them, my email went down a couple of times and it took forever to get the mess cleared up. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of a major project when this happened and it reqired a workaround. My carrier gave me a credit for the inconvenience.

 

As always, update your roaming and reprogram your phone just before leaving internationally. One trick people forget when having issues is to turn the phone off and then back on so that the new in-country signals are encoded into the phone. Hope this is helpful.

[+ Hoover42]

Kevin, if you have a smartphone and plan to use it in Canada to access the internet or use apps, be sure you check with Sprint first and verify the cost; international data roaming can be quite expensive. For example, on ATT it's $14 a MB which adds up fast! One trick that has worked for me is to sign up for an international data roaming package just for one month that costs only $25 for the first 20MB and then cancel the plan after the first month. $25 vs $280 is quite a savings

[Dave]

hey Kevin - hope you have a good trip there!

 

since youre not on verizon this may not apply, but fyi -

before i head north, i go on an updated roaming plan (mentioned above). but to be honest with you, i would say about half the time the service was sketchy, ie couldnt make phone calls or couldnt get emails. and one time i called to get on the plan, but post-trip my bill was inordinately high, so i called verizon and in fact they hadnt changed my plan - ! luckily i knew who i had spoken with before, so they were able to track that and change the bill. so be the smart consumer and take down the person's name you speak with and their ext, if you change your roaming plan. then remember to change it back once you return.

 

and do meet Mark if you can, he's very sweet.

 

g'luck!

Dave