Roaming cell phone services in Europe for Americans seriously down

[thewayne]

The three major providers, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, are all suffering major outages in Europe, affecting Americans using roaming services over there. An intermediate service provider, Syniverse, which apparently manages international roaming, has an outage and now all of them are screwed. It may also be disrupting cell service for locals, the article didn't mention it but some Slashdot commenters did.

This is why when we were in Europe in '15 we bought local SIMs. There was no way that I was going to put up with roaming rates while over there. But apparently with phone locking, it can be tricky to do this nowadays. Still, our phones are paid off and ours, I bought them at an Apple Store, so they shouldn't be locked in the first place.

I had to buy a small Android phone for Russet as her phone at the time didn't do GSM, so wouldn't work over there regardless.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/27/international_roaming_outage_us_telcos/

Comments

[kaishin108]

I have ATT and two years ago it was $10 a day, yikes.
I just used Whatsapp and signal

[thewayne]

We just told our friends and family that you can reach us via email.  I don't remember if I even sent my parents the German/EU phone numbers, we were just using the phones for mapping, texting each other when I was out, and looking stuff up.

[thewayne]

I had Telegram installed, which is a secure messaging platform.  I suppose when we go back to the EU, we'll probably set that or something like it up with friends.  A lot of our friends are in the iPhone sphere, so we can Facetime with them for free over WiFi with something else for our Droid friends.

[kaishin108]

Yes, now we have some work around vs those high fees!

[devilc]

We tried to put a local sim in Ralph's phone when we were in Germany, but it had a PIN lock on swapping a sim. We tried every number we could think of, but after we failed attempt 9, we gave up, because we didn't want to brick his phone.

So we then tried using Whats App on his phone so he could at least do calls over WiFi, but fucking Meta blocked his account after 1 day.

[thewayne]

Oh, man!  That royally sucks.  Russet and I have a number that we use when we need a PIN that we won't forget, but normally I won't do something like a sim lock.

[thewayne]

Should have seen and replied to the edited reply. :-)  Blocked by Meta for using an app the way it should be?  That sucks!  While I have several reasons for not using any of Meta's products, I'll definitely add that one to the list!

[disneydream06]

Once again, we are at the mercy of Corporate. :o :o :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

The USA is run by corporations, we are but grist for their mill.

[disneydream06]

Yeppers...

[silveradept]

And here I had thought the accepted practice for international travel was to get a phone that would connect to the local networks, rather than bringing your own phone along. Given how much of things are connected to various accounts, this seems like a good idea, and it means that you don't have to fight anybody's customs or desire to slurp up your data at the border.

[richardf8]

We buy local SIMs so people will return our calls.

[thewayne]

Makes perfect sense to me!