Roaming: What is it, what is it for and how much does it cost to have data service while traveling?

Most people don’t even know about the existence of Roaming, but today we tell you that this is in charge of communication between two operators to give you a connection or a signal, but when it is active the rates can increase, which we are not going to like very much.

Here we are going to explain the distribution of the rates according to the operators, showing you the 5 operators most important in Spain. What if we are going to advance you is that not all of them have the same rates and one may be economically more feasible than another.

We will also teach you those tricks that you will need to use if you are one of those people who are enemies of excessive spending. The more we save, the more we can enjoy our trips.

What is Roaming and what is this service from your operator for?

The word roaming is the English translation of Roamingwhose word we can see very common in our phonessince it is widely used in the area of ​​telecommunications for indicate that the wireless device has left the network coverage assigned to it as primary.

Well, this concept can be specified a bit. In mobile telephony, is used to indicate the possibility for clients to use a different network when you leave the determined range, this happens more frequently when you have to leave the country. The network identifier in this case is the sim cardwhich is responsible for communication between different operators.

You can also see this mode (Roaming), on some Wi-Fi networks, which means the client can roam to any other wireless network. In this case, the way to identify is by means of a personal username and password, which must be shared by different networks.

How much does it cost to have service while traveling on my mobile operator?

we show you how to find out the cost of your service with each of the most important telephone companies in the country:

Movistar

If we are Movistar customers and we want to travel, we will have to take into account that the rates increase from the moment Roaming is activated on our device. To be able to consult these rates we must enter the Movistar page.

Here we can search for the country where we want to travel and select the type of service we use (contract or prepaid). When we click on “Search” a box will appear where it details what we must pay additionally for activating this service in the indicated country.

Yoigo

Yoigo rates are a bit different than Movistar, and are organized as follows:

Roaming rates for Internet coverage

The rates for the EU and associated countries is 0 euros/national rate. Such a fee will not charge us even half a euro for the roaming serviceso we can enjoy many of these services within this range without having to pay anything more.

More explicitly, we can say that if we travel to any country within the European Union, Yoigo You will only charge us for the consumption of our navigationjust as if we were in Spain, and we will not be assigned an additional cost.

Yoigo divides the countries by zones. The countries that belong to Zone 1 are the following:

Germany; Slovenia; Malt; Austria; Spain; Norway; Belgium; Greece; Netherlands; Bulgaria; Hungary; Poland; Cyprus; Ireland; Luxembourg; Croatia; Iceland; Czech Republic; Denmark; Italy; Romania; Estonia; Vatican City; Sweden; Slovakia; Latvia; France (including Martinique Island, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin and French Guiana); United Kingdom (including Gibraltar); Portugal (including Madeira and Azores); Liechtenstein; Lithuania; Finland

While the rates for the rest of the world they have a cost of 10.89 euros/MB. If the country that we have in mind is not within the list that was shown above, we will have to know that there if we will have an additional cost, so Yoigo identifies the rest of the world as Zone 2.

Roaming rates for call and text coverage

Like Internet browsing Yoigo, considers that all calls and messages received within the countries that are located within Zone 1, will not have any additional costwhile if we carry them out they will have it.

For calls made, the following is considered:

If the countries we are going to visit are within zone 1, will have the same rate as the one used within the country (Spain). While if they are inside Zone 2, it will have a cost. Of €2.54/minute.

This also applies to sending messages, as follows:

The countries within zone 1 will not have any increase in their rate, while the countries that are located within zone 2, will cost 0.36 euros for each message. This is also true for sending multimedia messages (SMS).

We can consult more the rates, through the following link.

Jazztel

The Jazztel operator offers the following rates for those who wish to travel or leave their country of residence. The first thing we need to know is that all countries that are within Zone 1 are not assigned any additional cost to your rate.

While the countries of Zone 2 will have an additional cost of 7 euros for every 100 MB consumed, and for the standard contracts that cover the countries of Zone 2 and Zone 3 a cost of 12.10 euros for each MB.

To review in more detail the rates for each country or for each service, visit the next page.

Orange

For Orange, Roaming-type data consumption is distributed in Go Europe, Mobile Internet, Contract or Card, Everywhere. Go Europe, is the type of Roaming established for the countries of the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, whose cost for data consumption it is 1 euro for every 100 MB.

If we go to the type of Mobile Internet Roaming, it will cost €12.1/1 MB, which this type of roaming covers all the countries of the world. For the contract or card, which also covers all the countries of the world, It has a cost of €6.05/500 KB.

Finally, roaming Everywhere, which covers countries such as Russia, Andorra, Switzerland, the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Morocco, Japan and China, It has a cost of €7/100 MB.

For more information, visit the page.

Vodafone

For now Vodafone offers a roaming service for people who are going to travel to the United States where the rates They have the same cost as the national. This rate is known as the Rate for the countries of the European Union, where you must pay €1/200 MB.

We can also enjoy other rates such as The Fare Travels the World and Rate Vodafone World. where the first It has a cost of €15/200 MBwhose countries involved within this range are those belonging to the Zone 2 list, and in other cases of the same rate makes a charge of €15/20 MB.

The second Rate that we show has three types, one that has a cost of €6.05/1MBwhere it only covers Zone 2. The second with the same cost that covers Zone 3 and the last one where you must pay €18.15/1 MB that covers the Zone 4.

To find more information we must visit the official site.

What tips can I apply to spend less while using my rate abroad?

As we have already seen, the costs of the rates can increase markedly when we use our phone with active data consumption. For this reason, we bring you some tips that you should use to avoid these fees:

Let’s turn off all data and look for a Wi-Fi network

The operators charge for data consumption, but if we do not consume the data they will not charge us anything, so we must deactivate data consumption and look for a Wi-Fi network where we can navigate and contact us at no additional cost.

Let’s look for open Wi-Fi networks

Many countries have Wi-Fi networks open to the public which are completely free, so we recommend using an application known as Free Zone Wi-Fi which allows you to know which networks are open and how far you can reach them, as well as allowing you to connect to those networks automatically.

We can find this application available for both Android and iOS.
Let’s use app to communicate with calls and messages

To complete these tips, it is highly recommended to use applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram to establish communication with other people, because they do not necessarily need data consumption, since they can be used via a Wi-Fi network.

Do I need to manually activate Roaming or is it automatic? What if I don’t want it?

Roaming is a predestined feature on most devices, so we can always see that it is activated automaticallybut this can be disabled manuallyas well as it can also happen that we want to activate it and the only way to do it is manually.

Configuration and settings

To avoid high data consumption, we can set our phone with a limitso that consumption is normalized and does not exceed more than we are willing to pay.

For this we are going to “Settings” and we search “Data Usage” A warning will appear which we click on “To accept” and we limit how we want our consumption to be. Just as we saw in the notice, the data connection or their consumption will be disabled just by exceeding that limit in order to prevent further consumption.

Activate and deactivate service

This is the best solution in most cases, so if we want to deactivate the service we go to the mobile and look for “Settings”, then we select “Wireless connections and networks/mobile networks” and uncheck the boxes where it says “Mobile data” and “Data roaming”.