Rogers Roaming the USA

Peter Rukavina

My trip to the USA earlier this month was my first trip after switching from pre-paid “Pay As You Go” service from Rogers Wireless to a regular monthly account. And where on previous trips I’d avoided using my mobile altogether, on this trip I decided to experiment and see what additional roaming charges I’d incur if I went about something approximately regular usage.

And so while I didn’t spend hours on the phone calling home, I was fairly liberal with calling friends and colleagues in the US, sending text messages, and making occasional use of data (mostly for local search and maps in Brooklyn).

Over the course of 6 days traveling, I incurred $37.52 in extra charges on top of my regular $50/month bill, as follows:

  • $2.13 for adding “Call Display” to my account (pro-rated portion of the $8/month fee for this service), added so that I could see who was calling me while traveling and decide whether or not to answer the call.
  • $13.32 for 9 minutes of voice calling (a rate of about $1.50/minute).
  • $9.17 for using 1523KB of data.
  • $4.50 for sending 6 text messages within the US.
  • $1.00 for sending 2 text messages from Canada to the US.
  • $4.10 for sending 14 text messages within Canada.
  • $3.30 for receiving 22 text messages while in the US.

I’m not complaining about the charges – I could have mitigated some of them by pre-paying some minutes in a “roaming pack” if I’d wanted – but what irks me is that there was no way for me to monitor my roaming charges while I was on the road.

Rogers only adds these up, customer service tells me, at the “end of the billing cycle,” so I had to have faith that I wasn’t accidentally racking up hundreds of dollars worth of roaming fees; it was only a call to Rogers’ customer service that produced information about the breakdown of the charges.

Comments

Submitted by RogersCerys on

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Hi Peter, Glad to hear you’re finding value in your Rogers service. The reason that real-time billing isn’t currently available is due to the extensive partner ecosystem that we use to support our traveling customers, but I’ve passed your feedback to our teams here. This kind of insight is very helpful to us. I thought your readers might also be interested in this post on the Rogers Redboard blog: http://redboard.rogers.com/201….
For example, the One Rate data plans Rogers launched in February are designed for frequent travelers in North America and are worry-free as you draw from the same data bucket in both Canada and the U.S.
Happy travels from RogersCerys and the online communications team!

Submitted by parent on

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Just a comment for anyone that has a teenager. KooDoo has excellent plans. There is no contract and for 25 dollars a month they can have UNLIMITED texting and 100 mins of call mins(any time of day) and free calling after 7pm. Teenagers text 99% of the time. We have had this for our teenage son for a year and have seen no hidden costs.

Submitted by Robert Smith on

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My Phone number is 604 765 5546 I ordered apackage of 15 minutes roaming in april there were a few days left and some minutes but when it looked like I was goimg to be longer i texted for additional minutes of 40 this text was sent on 03 31 2012 I I got no response for 3 days then recieved a message saying incomplete so I respomded please advise as I know I used this quite a bit I had been informed that all I had to do to extend my time was respomd to the original message I am still in the U.S and need a reply robert

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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