Another factor for international travel is whether you phone has the right bands to get signal. My carrier claims to have international roaming, but I look up what bands my model phone has and what the country I'm going to uses and I pretty much would not get signal anyway.
Are you sure? There's a pretty good overlap these days in globally supported bands on at least a baseline level.
You might not be able to use a provider's extended/rural or dense urban canyon filler cells, but I haven't yet been to a place where I didn't get any roaming connectivity at all.
In some countries (the US included), providers restrict the ability of devices not capable of e.g. VoIP to connect on certain bands (as there is no circuit switched fallback available there, and there's an FCC mandate that calls, in particular 911 calls, have to work wherever data works), but that's usually not applied to inbound roaming guests.
> Are you sure? There's a pretty good overlap these days in globally supported bands on at least a baseline level.
Most Chinese imported phones have really poor band support in the US. Lucky to get band 2 and band 5 at best.
> In some countries (the US included), providers restrict the ability of devices not capable of e.g. VoIP to connect on certain bands (as there is no circuit switched fallback available there, and there's an FCC mandate that calls, in particular 911 calls, have to work wherever data works), but that's usually not applied to inbound roaming guests.
US all circuit switched data is basically gone except for a few rural carriers and maybe a few pockets of 2G left on T-Mobile (was shut down on my local towers in past few weeks). Unsure of the 911 IMS carrier profile support on models not intended for US market.
