Thanks to the crazy roaming cost of data, when I travel to the US, I use my AT&T SIM card. I simply forward all calls from my Canadian number to my AT&T SIM and I’m off and running – sort of. There’s two small problems. The first is text messages; These just don’t forward and I don’t think there’s much I can do about that. I just have to hope the people sending them to me know that I’m traveling and will use my US cell number. The other problem is mobile data. Until recently, there wasn’t much you could do about this with a pay-as-you-go (or Pre-Paid as it’s now referred to as) account. I don’t travel to the US enough times in a year to go that route. Perhaps the time will come when that is the case, but for now I’m staying on the pre-paid service.
AT&T has a pretty good plan where you can pre-pay $100 and it will last for 1 full year. So I don’t have to keep worrying about refilling the account every 2-3 months. Unfortunately, the cost per KB of data was still pretty high so I didn’t tend to do much with data when I was down there. However, my fellow MVP and friend Arne Hess of The::Unwired posted some news about a new pre-paid unlimited data plan. So on my recent visit to the US, I thought I would give this a try. Once I checked into the hotel I dialed 611 on my AT&T phone and worked my way through the prompts and sure enough I was able to add an unlimited data package to my phone for the next 30 days. The cost? Just $19.99! AT&T took the money out of my pre-paid yearly balance, so I didn’t have to worry about how I was going to pay them for this and that’s just fine with me.
In the end, I only needed the data for 5 or 6 days, but the unlimited option means I don’t have to worry about the high cost of per KB data. I was free to stream TV from my SlingBox, track my movements and find things close to my location using Live Search, and of course, the old stand-by of email and web. If you’re going to be traveling to the US, I strongly suggest you think about using a setup like this. It’s so much cheaper than the $150 I paid for 3MB of roaming data on a previous trip!
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