[RTC List] Wireless advice

[William Van Hefner]

Julia,

I've never seen a T-Mobile contract before, but most cellphone carriers
will shut your phone off if more than 50% of your airtime is used in a
roaming area for more than one billing cycle. They lose money anytime you
call from a roaming area.

If you really need a local phone number, you can always just buy a local
DID from a VoIP provider and have that number forward calls directly to
your cellphone

I actually ported my own home phone number over to a VoIP provider and now
have all of my calls forwarded to my cell if I am not at home. I pay
around $10 a month, which gets me unlimited forwarded calls, incoming
calls and unlimited long distance calls within California, voicemail, etc.
Most importantly (to me, at least) it also lets me reject or divert calls
from any phone numbers I choose, which is great for telemarketers or
people I wish I had never given my phone number out to in the first place!
For the REALLY pesky telemarketers, I just have incoming calls loop back
to their own 800 #. That way, anytime they dial my number, they just
wind-up calling themselves! Isn't technology wonderful? :-)


-- 
William Van Hefner
President - Vantek Communications, Inc.
e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com

On Tue, January 20, 2009 8:23 pm, Julia wrote:
> As far as I know, Tmobile doesn't do roaming as part of their billing. I
> can see on my Tmobile phones that I'm bouncing from Edge and US Cellular
> towers most of the time and my coverage seems more or less that same as
> the people around me. Of course, that doesn't mean Tmobile will signup
> people in this area - I could only get a 707-228-**** number. I just
> haven't had to pay any extra fees for usage in this area.
>
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 7:13 PM, William Van Hefner <
> vantek at humboldtonline.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> T-Mobile - No service locally. I'm not sure that they even allow their
>> customers to roam in this area.