GoKawiilMatt Horne / Android Authority
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You hear horror stories of people unwittingly incurring monstrous mobile bills when roaming abroad. Just recently, one Reddit user was horrified to find that AT&T had clobbered them with a $53k charge, after an eight-day European trip they expected to run them about $100 in roaming fees. You tend to feel sorry for these people, while also having lingering thoughts that they’ve been dealt a very tough life lesson. Thankfully, my own roaming-fee surprise involved considerably fewer zeroes. I only incurred about $20 in roaming charges, so not a big hit, but what bothered me was that I’d done everything right to avoid using mobile data. At least, I thought I had.
How do you manage mobile data while traveling? 109 votes Buy an eSIM 39 % Use my carrier's roaming plan 35 % Wi-Fi only 23 % I don't use my phone while traveling 3 %
You might be thinking I’m just as culpable, and maybe lucky I wasn’t charged more. I can assure you that wasn’t the case. I hadn’t forgotten to switch something over after landing, and this wasn’t a travel eSIM taking a few seconds to wake up. In fact, I wasn’t trying to use data at all. I live outside the country of my home network, and that SIM sits in a separate phone on my desk. Mobile data and roaming are switched off in the device settings, plus the phone is always connected to my Wi-Fi network. I rarely even touch the device and don’t use it to contact anyone, to the point that it’s more of a paperweight than a phone. Despite all that, I was hit with phantom roaming charges twice in three months.
So what happened? And, more importantly, how can you stop it from happening to you?
Where did the phantom roaming charges come from?
Sanuj Bhatia / Android Authority
The first charge appeared on my bill a couple of months ago. My carrier had recorded a tiny amount of roaming data usage — well under 200KB — and that was enough to trigger its full daily roaming fee. I checked my phone because the obvious explanation was that I’d somehow left something switched on, but both mobile data and data roaming were disabled.
I grumbled to myself and shrugged it off, but then it happened again two months later. Another minuscule amount of data and another full day’s roaming charge. Oddly, both incidents happened on the final day of the month. In any event, it wasn’t about the money anymore. I now knew this wasn’t a one-off occurrence, and I wanted to stop it from happening again.
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