Welcome to France... Really?

Cell Phones are funny things. Cell phone rates aren’t in most cases, especially if you are talking about roaming rates on a pre-paid or pay-as-you-go phone. Normally I don’t worry about my roaming. In the US my minutes are my minutes no matter were I go. I have one rate period. However the last 5 months I am almost never in the states so this has changed the game. While in the UK I use a pre-paid or as they call it a pay-as-you-go phone, it is really on good in the UK. When I run out of minutes I log onto the website and “top up” or pay for more minutes. A weird and great part of the plan is that I can call (from the UK) Eastern Europe or Russia for less than I can call someone in the UK, 7p vs. 15p. When I am not in the UK I switch back to my ATT phone which outside of the US cost between $1.25 and $2 a minute for international roaming (ouch). But generally any calls I need to make are business related and I can expense them so that is nice.

What is funny is that every time I get off a plane I get a welcome text from the local provider. It generally says welcome to x country please remember you are now roaming. Some even give you the option of sending a text message so the network does not forward calls and/or texts to you allowing only out going calls. This is a nice feature that is for sure. It is also nice that I can swap the SIM cards from one phone to the other so I only have to travel with a single phone. And I am really happy that my phones work pretty much all over the world. It is just too bad that there is no true world provider. It would be really nice if ATT could partner with all these other providers and provide a true one-rate no matter where you are. Or T-Mobile, or any other player. O2 in the UK is starting to offer European one-rate plans, but that would still require me to have 2 different plans.

Anyway, having all of these complicated systems, and segregated networks can have amusing side effects as well. This can really be crazy when countries are so close that their networks overlap. So you are physically in one country but roaming with your phone in another. You would think being in the UK, a large Island, that this wouldn’t be a problem. And since Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the like all use the same networks you really wouldn’t expect to be caught off guard by ending up on the wrong network. Well this is exactly what happen to me a few weeks back. While exploring the White Cliffs of Dover along the eastern seacoast of England I got a text message. I figured it must be time to call the wife and she was getting a little anxious (she likes me to call rather promptly). Nope it was a message reading “Welcome to France”. Only I wasn’t in France. I was still in England. Across the freaking English channel! Well apparently T-Mobile in France has better signal than T-Mobile in the UK, because I was picked up by the French network.

So unfortunately RG had to wait a little while for me to call so that I wouldn’t be roaming in France. This certainly would have depleted my pre-paid account quite rapidly. I have to say while the Cliffs and the Exploring of the area was fun, the big surprise was roaming in France that day.