Receiving text on international travel

In theory, yes, that should work. But be aware that prepaid roaming receives many complaints on this forum.

Prepaid roaming requires one of two types of technology: USSD or CAMEL.

USSD is older and requires that the user dial special codes or use a special SIM app to dial numbers while roaming and it doesn’t play well with WiFi Calling. It is, however, generally reliable and works in spite of the roaming partner, rather than with their cooperation..T-Mobile has never used USSD roaming.

CAMEL is the newer way and what T-Mobile uses. It requires a lot of real-time cooperation between T-Mobile and the roamed carrier and everything has to work perfectly and it seems to require a lot of maintenance. With CAMEL you dial calls the same way as postpaid roaming and it doesn’t matter if you are on WiFi or cellular. The problem is that T-Mobile does not seem to put the effort into constantly checking to see if CAMEL roaming is working with all their international partners.

I don’t work for T-Mobile, so I don’t actually know all the issues. I’m making a lot of guesses. Just I would never count on T-Mobile’s prepaid roaming. The European operators do a lot better job.

At one time I would have suggested a specialized prepaid international roaming SIM (e.g. Piranha Mobile) but they seem to have lost their edge. The issue seems to be that regulation of pan-European roaming rates seems to have undercut the demand for prepaid specialized roaming solutions among Europeans and US carriers seem to have always regarding prepaid customers as 2nd class citizens and international roaming as a premium service.