Sorry if this has been asked before, but I can't seem to find any answers. I'm considering switching to a simply prepaid plan, but spend a lot of time in an area with only roaming coverage (US Cellular is the only network there). As a prepaid customer, would domestic roaming for calls/texts be included in my plan? Also, would I get any data?
Thanks!
Best answer by gramps28
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+14
This article says you should call because prepaid plans vary.
Please contact us if you're unsure how much domestic roaming data you have, because this varies between our many plans.
How hard can it be to publish the five or six numbers? Unless they are all zero and they just want to hide that.
I give them a 1 star rating by hiding this information and forcing people to wade through a long customer “service” call to get that information. Shame on them. It’s prompted me to look at other carriers.
I’m only wondering about this now because my wife’s phone often cannot get a signal when mine does, sometimes on the freeway in Seattle. We are Magenta 55+ plan members. I did some research on her phone specs and see that her phone has fewer LTE radio frequencies in use than my phone. But roaming might help, unless that’s not actually part of the plan. Which isn’t on their web site -- I assume zero domestic roaming then, since it’s not spelled out as a feature.
The answer you got from gramps28 is 100% wrong. There is NO domestic roaming included for prepaid T-Mobile plans. I’ve had a prepaid plan for a few years and have NEVER been permitted to roam domestically. At this moment, I manually forced my device to connect to Sprint, but it’s showing “Emergency Service Only,” and no data.
Few weeks ago, the local T-Mobile cell was down, my device was on “emergency service only” and no data. T-Mobile rep tried to boast about the Sprint network serving customers, and couldn’t explain why Sprint’s network had me locked out. And that’s with roaming enabled on the device.
And T-Mobile never gave me a credit for the time (most of the day) when their system was blocking me from the data service I paid for.
A few minutes ago, I set my device to connect manually to Sprint. Not working (again). T-Mobile is still blocking me from domestic roaming.
T-Mobile designed their network to only cover a small fraction of each market where they operate, so without domestic roaming, T-Mobile prepaid can only access maybe 10% of the US cellular coverage areas they show on their “map.”
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Here's a screenshot of a Tmobile prepaid map coverage so maybe it's dependant on the area you're at.
Thanks for this interesting information, but my prepaid account doesn’t fall into any of those categories. I’ve also spoken with three T-Mobile support people today and they all said there’s no reason why domestic roaming should not be working on my account. Since those guys are hands-on with the network and account configuration details, that supercedes anything in the sales propaganda.
Also, that coverage map is 100% fiction. It shows a friend’s house in Illinois as solidly within the “5G Ultra” and “4G LTE” coverage area, and he barely gets a usable signal. He’s spending a significant amount of money with them, recently added about $100 add-on international roaming data plans for his work, and with all that, he’s getting warning emails that his international roaming is being disabled because he’s using it too much data! Obviously, that won’t last much longer.
And just for fun, I checked out a neighborhood in Los Angeles where I was working at a client’s site, and confirmed there was zero coverage (with my devices in test mode). Got photos of the T-Mobile cell site with the antennas missing in the direction of my client’s office (this site only had two sectors). On another day, driving along the pacific coast, I lost coverage (phone and data) along a large portion of Redondo Beach (twice, going and coming back).
The coverage simply doesn’t exist. Yet the T-Mobile map shows solid 4G LTE coverage throughout the entire city. Don’t mean to be disrespectful on this, but save this map for the newbies.
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