Factory Unlock Phone vs Roaming Fees

  

If you phone is "in contract" with your carrier and you travel, you may end up paying hefty charges for roaming fees to call your loved ones back home. There are several factors to consider whether you should opt for having your mobile factory unlocked vs just paying up the roaming charges. Here are a few: - Duration of Travel - Place of Travel - How many calls you will be making - Business Travel vs Personal Travel - Type of use - Network your phone is currently locked to - Ease of getting temporary SIM at your travel destination Considering all these factors,  you will need to look at which applies to you the most to make your decision:

Duration of Travel:

If you will be traveling for an extended period of time, then factory unlocking your phone may be the right decision. If you are locked to a network in the US, roaming fees for other countries may vary from $1 to $8 per minute depending upon which country you are traveling to.

Place of Travel:

Roaming fees for different countries is different. Roaming fees in Asia will be less than what you will pay for in Middle east for example. If you travel to India, your roaming fees on AT&T network is about $2 to $3 per minute.  Travel to Iran, Iraq or other countries where network availability is an issue and you pay much more.

Number and duration of calls:

If you will very seldom use your phone just to tell your loved ones about a quick status of where you are, then roaming fees may not be much. But start using your phone more often or make extended calls, those fees will rack up quickly.

Business vs Personal use:

If you will be using your phone for business use and your company will be paying for the usage when traveling, then you may be fine because the cost of roaming fees will be paid or reimbursed by your company. Often times, companies may provide local phones in the country that you are traveling.

Type of Use:

Now days, making calls is only one function of the phone. You may also want to use the internet on your phone for checking email, surfing the web and using other applications that make use of the internet. There will be roaming fees for internet usage as well. Check your carrier to see what the cost per minute or per MB will be for internet use and see if Factory Unlock may be the right solution

Network you are currently locked to:

Roaming fees are very dependent on the network that you are locked to. eg: in US, T-Mobile introduced lower charges for roaming fees. So your roaming charge on T-Mobile may be considerably less than what you would pay on other networks. Considering that T-Mobile is a more expensive network to Unlock, using their roaming fees may be the right solution. But do check other criteria as well.

Availability of SIM cards on foreign networks:

When traveling, there are some countries where getting a new GSM SIM card is quick , cost effective and the amount of documentation required is not that much. eg: when traveling to India, you can get a temporary SIM card for about $2 and you can put refill amounts for as little as $1 at a time. Of course if you will be using it more, it is recommended that you top up with $10 at a time.  For other countries, the requirements may be a little different. As a rule of thumb, developed and developing countries generally make it easy to get temporary SIM cards for travelers. Note that at arrivals of many airports in most countries, you may have a booth that sell prepaid phone cards. You may use those as they will still be much cheaper than using roaming on your phone. But your phone MUST be unlocked in order to use these cards.

To unlock your phone on AT&T network, Click here:

To unlock your phone on AT&T and all other carriers around the world, click here:

Do note that time to unlock may be 1 to 15 days depending on the phone make, model and the network that you are locked to. So purchase the factory unlock service ahead of your travel time.