How can AT&T charge me to use WiFi while I'm abroad?
- By
- Aparna Patel
- |
- 20 Jul, 2023
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Last year we spent a month in SE Asia. Our flights were routed through Tokyo & Singapore. With an AT&T SIM in our phones, we were able to connect to WiFi in both places with no problems, and no extra charges on our bill.
Digression: Now, once we got into each country we visited, I’d purchase at least one local SIM and tuck the AT&T SIM for that phone into a safe place. Then I’d turn on a WiFi hotspot so my wife could connect her phone or Ipad and use my phone’s data plan.
Singapore in particular has a killer deal for tourists, a SIM with100GB of data for a month for $10, but SIMs were cheap everywhere we went with varying data plans.
Unless you have a phone the manufacturer of which has partnered with AT&T to only allow you to use Wi-Fi if you paid a ransom to AT&T (which would be very, very, very, surprising, and would most certainly only be the case for an AT&T-branded phone), as others have said, you are free to connect to any Wi-Fi network you like, and the “package” is most certainly only to use their partners’ Wi-Fi networks (which you would normally have paid for through other means).
You can easily check: if you are able to connect to any Wi-Fi network (home, office, public Wi-Fi…) in your home country, it’ll be the same when abroad.
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Here is a clear case of the representative being asked a question they don’t know the answer to. As others have pointed out, their training is minimal.
They are not allowed to admit not knowing except in very extreme cases as that would be bad for the corporate image.
If they say “It will be free” and is wrong, the customer (you) will be very very angry and sue AT&T and maybe even switch providers. Big bad risk.
If they say “It will cost you.” and is wrong, the customer will be annoyed at first but might be pleasantly surprised when the bill comes. Small risk.
They will go with the small risk.
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When your handset first talks to the phone company’s cell tower, there’s an authentication procedure. For example, your phone or its SIM card may have been blacklisted as stolen, or you could simply be too far behind on paying the bill. So at that point, whatever arrangement between Foreign Telecom (if you connected to their tower) and AT&T kicks in, or AT&T’s own rules, if it is one of there towers.
Basically they can charge what they please, subject to government regulation. I’m not sure I understand the question.
[EDIT: Although the OP is discussing WiFi, the package he refers to is for texts and calls.]
AT&T can’t charge you to use WiFi. From the page you linked to, that’s talking about a service where you connect to WiFi somewhere (like an airport) that you might normally have to pay for, and the provider of that WiFi has partnered with AT&T to allow AT&T customers to log in and use the WiFi.
This does not affect your ability to connect to any other public (or private) WiFi system, like a public library in London, your hotel in Hong Kong, or your friend’s house in Sydney.
Phone company representatives are trained to encourage you to forget about actual public WiFi, and buy their expensive package to connect to their partners. There’s also the possibility that the customer representative you talked to is simply not technically knowledgeable and only knows about what they’ve been told to say.
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Credit:stackoverflow.com‘
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