Forum Discussion
Overseas Travel: How can I avoid incoming call costs but still use free text/data roaming while abroad?
We're planning to travel to Europe later this year and would like to take advantage of T-Mobile's free international text/data roaming. However, I saw that incoming calls are charged at one minut...
Great question. The easiest way to do this is to enable unconditional call forwarding. This will tell the network to immediately forward the call to a selected number without trying to pin you first which is where the charge comes from.
To enable unconditional call forwarding, you will need to follow these steps https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-4041#secondheading
Dial **21*18056377249# from your phone to enable CFU and ##21# to turn it off when you are back in the states and want to resume being able to get calls.
The 18056377249 number is the same number that your calls are forwarded to when you do not answer the phone so that the people calling you can leave a VM. Since we are enabling unconditional call forwarding, the call will be automatically routed there instead of ringing your phone first.
With unconditional call forwarding, the call is not routed to your primary number. when someone calls your number, the network will not try to ping your device but rather send it to the number you set as the UCF number. Normally the charge for the call being routed to the VM comes from when your phone has send the request back to the T-Mobile network to send it to voicemail. Since UCF bypasses the need to ping your device, the call never touches your physical phone/SIM card to be routed back.
