How To Avoid Roaming Charges

By David

If you are a cell phone user, you have probably heard of or possibly even encountered roaming charges from using your phone outside your carrier’s native network. These fees can add up quickly and become both expensive and annoying. To help you avoid roaming charges in the future, here are a few simple tips to help you get started:

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Make Sure You are Covered

If you find that you are incurring a lot of roaming charges on a regular basis, you will want to take a look at your carrier’s native coverage area and find out where you are covered by it and where you are not. Identifying areas where you are not covered can help you avoid roaming charges by avoiding those areas, or if you find that your coverage isn’t wide enough, you may wish to consider switching to a carrier that will cover all the areas you frequent.

Avoid Roaming Areas

Once you have identified the places where you are not covered by your network’s native coverage area, you can avoid roaming charges by avoiding those places. Alternatively, you could simply commit to not using your cellular devices while you are in these areas if you find that avoiding them is just too big a sacrifice to make. This can take a great deal of personal discipline and may even require a little more knowledge about how your phone works (for instance how to place your phone in airplane mode so background applications do not use the network without your knowledge). Still, if the roaming charges are really hitting you hard, these extra little steps could prove to be worth it in the long run.

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Take advantage of Wi-Fi

Nowadays, it seems like Wi-Fi is available in more and more places completely open and free of charge. This presents some exciting opportunities to those who would like to avoid roaming charges. The way most phone companies set up their plans will allow a user to avoid using their plans data while in a Wi-Fi area because you are streaming through the Wi-Fi instead of the cellular network. More recently, many companies have begun doing the same thing for phone calls made while connected to a Wi-Fi area. The great thing about using the wireless connection instead of the network aside from the savings is that any wireless signal with internet access anywhere in the world is considered part of the native coverage area and thus will not cause you to incur roaming fees. To get this set up on your phone, first make sure your company offers Wi-Fi calling for free (which will sometimes require adding a free service to your plan) and then enable the Wi-Fi adapter on your phone. When you enter new Wi-Fi areas a little message will pop up indicating that networks are available and you simply select them and save the connection settings. The phone then remembers the networks and uses them automatically the next time you are in range.

Using these tips, you can start avoiding roaming charges.

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