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.
Conditional Call Forwarding to my Google Voice voicemail ended up in .25/per minute charges for each outgoing call forward, which were mostly SPAM calls. This was for the 11 weeks I was traveling in Finland, Ireland, and the UK in April, May, Oct, Nov 2022. When back in the states I tried setting Unconditional Call forward to test if it would hit my phone first or just go right to voicemail and as far as I can tell, the result was the same...my phone rang and then was eventually forwarded. It doesn't look like I can avoid being charged for calls that are forwarded to voicemail unless I turn the phone OFF.
WIFI calling: What surprised me the most was I was charged for my WIFI calls, which showed up on my bill as RW (Roaming WIFI) - even though I was using WIFI in my apartment and my phone app showed the WIFI symbol on the phone symbol on the keypad. I talked to a T-Mobile rep and he said that can happen if the WIFI stops working and you switch to cellular. He suggested using an internet only calling app like WhatsApp to ensure you're using data instead of cellular. So next trip I will have to ensure I'm either in Airplane mode when I make a WIFI call, or using an app.
