Forum Discussion
Internation Service
I have 5 cell phones on my account. I activated international coverage a week ago. NONE of my phones have had acceptable service. My phone went active when I arrived in Paris, France, last Thursday, June 20. I had service for about 2 hours. Since then, I have spend over 10 hours of my family vacation time trying to get someone at T-Mobile to address our « outage » I explained to the tech folks that my phone doesn't work so, you guessed it, they call me on m,y phone and leave a voice mail message.
When we go outside and face T-Mobile HQ in Washington, we occasionally get a whopping 3G connection for about 10 minutes. I have spent nearly 7 calls in excess of 45 minutes EACHD on hold (ok, ignore) only to have my call sent to Tech Support; then, I wait another 45 minutes to talk to someone - someone who has no idea how to resolve the problem.
I reached out to Mike Sievert, CEO, and he promised me that someone would be in touch shortly. That was at 8:02 PM tonight, Paris time. It is 9:57 PM and I haven't heard from anyone.
Bottom line, I will try to be a tourist tomorrow - again with NO SERVICE. What happens if my 2 year-old granddaughter falls and needs an ambulance? Maybe I can send smoke signals.
I've been in France for a month and have experienced various issues and outages which have put me in some pretty tough spots. Luckily my fiancé is French so I've been able to use her phone as needed and we have Wi-Fi in the evening. The past 3-4 days I have had 0 service though even with a magenta plan and international pass.
I reached out to T-mobile and this is the response I received. I asked if there was any idea when normal service would be restored. I was told that there is no definitive date in which I can expect the issue to be resolved. It's looking like I will be without a phone for the rest of the time I'm in France. This will make everything much more difficult and hinder my plans. I hope this helps answer any questions others may have that are facing this issue abroad. (This is not isolated to France.)
I am in Paris right now. My phone was working ok yesterday morning but who knows what happened that it has no signal since yesterday evening. I contacted T-Mobile via wifi/chat. They have no answer. This thing has completely ruined my trip. Imagine not knowing the language, three kids, not knowing our ways around, not being able to call Uber etc. I asked them for compensation for my time spent just trying to get this figured out. Talking to customer service for hours. They just don't care. I have 5 lines on my account and none of them is working. I have 4 more European countries to visit in the next few weeks and no signal! Don't know what will happen. This is so upsetting.
Possible patch**** (iPhone) In France I switched settings cellular data options > voice and data> to LTE. I also went to > network selection in settings and turned off automatic. I then selected F- Bouygues Telecom. This seems to have given me some level of stable signal. It isn't fast but it may work for you as a patch (in France). If you're in a country other than France, I would recommend trying the same thing, but manually select local networks until you hopefully find one that will be stable enough to make your phone usable
Same here I'm in Ecuador and today my phone has no service. I called 3 times already to T-Mobile and it looks that is a problem that they have with roaming. When I was on the phone with the rep I got service back but after 10 minutes that I hang up with T-Mobile the problem came back and no service again. My mom is in the same plan as me and her reception is fine. I hope they can fix this soon.
Pinkett wrote:
I am in Paris right now. …... This thing has completely ruined my trip. ….... I have 4 more European countries to visit in the next few weeks and no signal! Don't know what will happen. This is so upsetting.
Time to do some serious adulting. Are all 5 of your phones SIM locked? (Maybe T-Mobile will unlock them.) If "non", then get local SIMs or eSIMs for all the unlocked ones. If they are all locked, and T-Mobile won't unlock them, make a note to yourself to the effect that it was bad planning on your part, then pull out your credit card and buy at least one prepaid phone. People traveled and survived before cell phones. (I know. I was one of them.) It wasn't always easy but we survived. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
drnewcomb wrote:
Pinkett wrote:
I am in Paris right now. …... This thing has completely ruined my trip. ….... I have 4 more European countries to visit in the next few weeks and no signal! Don't know what will happen. This is so upsetting.
Time to do some serious adulting. Are all 5 of your phones SIM locked? (Maybe T-Mobile will unlock them.) If "non", then get local SIMs or eSIMs for all the unlocked ones. If they are all locked, and T-Mobile won't unlock them, make a note to yourself to the effect that it was bad planning on your part, then pull out your credit card and buy at least one prepaid phone. People traveled and survived before cell phones. (I know. I was one of them.) It wasn't always easy but we survived. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
If the phones are Android they can get a temporary unlock if it's an iPhone that is not an option.
