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Author
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Topic: Cellphone use near an international border
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
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Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-04-2012 08:05 PM
I'm currently staying with my fiancee in Southern California, and over the Labor Day weekend we took a mini-break in San Diego. While visiting the Cabrillo National Memorial and the Point Loma Lighthouse, both of our cellphones suddenly received an SMS message from T-Mobile (we're both on T-Mobile) telling us about roaming charges - that we'd have to pay $15/mb for data, this much for calls, that much for text messages, etc. etc. Given that neither phone was outside its home country (I have a separate cellphone for when I'm in the US to my British one), we wondered what was going on. Suddenly, several of the tourists around us started looking at their phones with a "What the?!" expression on their faces, too!
The only thing I can think of is that we were on very high ground and less than ten miles from the Mexican border: therefore, had our phones logged on to a transmitter mast on the other side of the border, with the result that T-Mobile thought we were in Mexico?
We're now back in the Inland Empire, 100 miles or so from the scene of the crime, so to speak, and neither of our online statements are listing any roaming charges. So if we were logged on to a mast in Mexico, we can't have been for long enough to run up any bill (neither of us received any calls or tried to use the net from our phones while we were there). But this did make me wonder - is this a known issue for people who live close to the US/Mexico and US/Canada borders? It must be a serious pain if your phone is constantly connecting to a mast over the border and running up a nasty roaming bill. I guess the only way round it is to disable roaming altogether, either in your phone settings or your account options with the phone company.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
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Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-04-2012 10:44 PM
I live on the shore of Lake Erie, about 30 miles as the crow flies from Long Point, Ontario.
If I'm standing on the shore, especially on Presque Isle, my phone occasionally roams to a Canadian cell site. I bet boaters and fishermen have it worse.
If your provider is Verizon, dial *ACT and choose the "Update Roaming List" option. Your phone will update its list of cell sites that it will be allowed to roam to. The caveat is that, if the phone doesn't get signal from a site in its home region, it can still roam.
(I don't know your provider nor do I know how to access that option for other systems.)
Often, powering the phone off, waiting for couple of minutes then powering on again, will allow the phone to renegotiate a link to the nearest tower, hopefully one in your home range.
If those two things don't work, my only advice would be to watch your roaming indicator and shut the phone off if you can't get it to handshake with a tower from home. :dontknow:
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
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Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-05-2012 12:59 AM
Many thanks Randy. I think there's setting buried somewhere in the Blackberry menu whereby you can tell it not to allow roaming even if your phone company will (i.e. disable it at the phone level), but would need to investigate.
Thinking about this, the border area around San Diego and Tijuana is urban and densely populated: therefore, the people who live and work in that neighbourhood must have a way of dealing with this issue. Ditto for all the land borders around the relatively small countries in mainland Europe, Africa etc. I guess it just took me by surprise because, thanks to physical geography, this is not a problem anywhere in Great Britain! That having been said, I do remember coming back from France a few years ago, that while we were waiting to drive onto the car ferry from Calais to Dover (around 25 miles - you can see the coast of England from France and vice-versa on a clear day), my phone was picking up a mast from the other side and the roaming icon had disappeared. But I doubt that there'd be a problem with French phones picking up English masts, because the signal would be so much weaker than a local one.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 09-05-2012 05:49 AM
I hop between countries all the time and live near two international borders... This is actually nothing special. If your own network doesn't have any coverage in that site, but an international roaming partner does, your phone will hook up to that cell and register itself with that network. It sometimes happens on unexpected locations. Many operators are kind enough to send you an SMS, informing you about the charges, in Europe this is mandatory.
You can manually force your phone to your "home" network, although some phones will always come up with a list of available networks, once it drops off of your home network. This is quite a nuisance, because this might happen quite often, depending on your situation. If I go to the basement for a short while and go back, my phone would be back in "Network List" mode.
Most modern phones can also automatically disable your Internet connection, once you leave the home network. Since you pay horrendous fees per Megabyte, you should really watch your data usage outside of your home network, especially on modern shiny phones that have all kind of things running and fetching updates on the background. My girlfriend, who just recently upgraded to a shiny new smartphone with many bells and whistles, found this out the hard way...
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