Forum Discussion
Beware of T-Mobile in Costa Rica
So it appears that for some reason T-Mobile never switched my wife from Mexico to Costa Rica when we got here three months ago, it did however switch her service when we went to Panama for one day, when we got back here it immediately relocated her phone back to Mexico. They have never seen this before and are trying to adjust our bill but give us mumbo jumbo about only being able to adjust 60 days history and can't do anything about the other 30 days. If this happened to here phone my hunch is this is some glitch, possibly as we'd just got her a new phone, the fancy droid flip which is 5G and T-Mobile network isn't properly recognizing it. Probably a pretty big issue here for T-Mobile as more and more of these devices come into country and they erroneously bill customers. Seems like a nasty bug, bad customer service as much as they tried and possible class action at some point. T-Mobile should make sure some of the engineers get info on this, would be interesting to see if they can replicate it with another device or find other accounts showing excessive Mexico to Costa Rica calls.
I don't understand the switching from Mexico to Costa Rica to Panama. On most current accounts Mexico roaming is "like home". Costa Rica and Panama are 25¢/min. It would seem that if T-Mobile treated Costa Rica like Mexico, that would be a good thing.
You'd think so but for some reason the calls that show going from Mexico to Panama when we are in Panama and to other countries are charged at something like 2.50 a minute. Even the T-Mobile support folks can't figure this out when looking at our bill especially when it's happening on my wife's phone and not mine and I make 10 times the calls she does. Our theory is it may have something to do with her having a 5G Droid vs my IPhone (family divided) but I blame everything on her droid. All I can say is beware of using them in Panama and check your bill, her line was charged for hundreds in calls every month.
Did the $2.50 charge apply to outgoing calls only? Was she on WiFi at the time? Does her line have the "Stateside-International" calling option? Does yours?
The calls state they are wifi, from Mexico. She is on the same plan I am. T-Mobile has viewed the billing details and stated there system is charging incorrectly. As I mentioned they credited 2 months but say they are not able to go back further. Am I missing something regarding your questions? My post was simply meant as a warning to folks in or coming to Costa Rica to watch their bill closely, I don't expect resolution to something both customer service and technical support at T-Mobile can't explain and state are erroneous charges.
It's a matter of debate if this is still the case but in the past if you made a cellular call from a "Simple Choice" country to any "Simple Choice" country it was 25¢/min. If you made a WiFi call to any country, the call was charged as if dialed from the USA. Which was often around $3/min. If it costs $2.50/min to call the destination from Mexico and the system was confused about where the WiFi Call originated, it would cost the same thing in Costa Rica.
This sort of situation is why I avoid using T-Mobile for calling international destinations and fall back to Google Voice of Viber Out.
I once saw a complaint where someone made a WiFi call from Turkey which should have been free but the system thought he was calling from Tuvalu and charged something like $5/min.
Seems odd that two phones, on same plan, dialing similar numbers (countries) and fashion (mix of cell and WiFi) would be charged differently on the same account. Behavior you describe should have impacted both numbers not just one but that's in the details and weeds. Appreciate your comments. Cheers.
