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International data roaming fees

By Michelle Higgins, The New York Times

To avoid roaming fees completely, select airplane mode or turn off data roaming on your smartphone until you are in a Wi-Fi hot spot, where you can check e-mail or use the Web at much lower costs (often free).  If you were to do either while roaming, your bill would show it.  Plan your trip around Internet cafes, hotel lounges or other free Wi-Fi spots.

If you don’t want to be limited to Wi-Fi in order to read e-mail or access the Internet, consider an international data package, which will allow you to roam at low pre-paid rates.

Last month AT&T introduced international add-on options that provide travelers with more than double the data provided in previous deals.

Travelers who choose an add-on, which is tacked on to existing domestic calling and data plans, now get 50 MB for $25 a month, and up to 800 MB for $200 a month. The data packages are available in more than 100 countries.

Regardless of the data plan you choose, be sure to set your phone’s usage tracker to zero so that you can keep track of how much data you are using while you’re gone. 

If you don’t want to worry about monitoring your data use at all, a pre-paid data package is an easy way to stick to your budget. Telestial, a communications retailer that provides wireless services for travelers, offers deals for smartphone and tablets with rates as low as $1 per megabyte in many countries, including France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and Britain.

To get those rates travelers must also buy a Passport SIM card ($29), which allows your unlocked cellphone to work overseas and includes $10 of credit for local calls, texts and data. Once you hit your data limit, you must add money to the card if you want to use more. You can also set up auto-loading so that whenever you use up, say, a $10 balance, Telestial will automatically load another $25 (or other pre-determined amount) to your account.

Boost your data package
It has recently become possible to get more out of those international data packages, thanks to new mobile tools that condense downloaded data. Onavo (onavo.com) a new Tel Aviv-based start-up, has an iPhone app that compresses users’ Web, e-mail and application data. The company states that customers who buy, say, a 50 MB, $25-a-month global data package can triple the data by using Onavo.

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