Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Cellphone use near an international border

This is topic Cellphone use near an international border in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 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.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 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:

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 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.

Posted by Marcel Birgelen (Member # 6801) on 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...

Posted by Tom Sauter (Member # 616) on 09-05-2012, 06:30 AM:

I live and work less than a mile from the US-Canadian border (I can see Ontario from my office). With hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the metro area, they just don't charge international roaming for US subscribers hitting a tower on the edge of Canada.

A few months back AT&T started texting me when I grabbed a Canadian tower, and I called them up and asked them to turn the notification off (which they did). I explicity asked the rep about roaming charges and my call was escalated several times until I reached a manager who explained their policy: they ignore roaming charges within a reasonable distance of the US border. Years ago I had a massive bill from accidentally roaming on a Canadian tower for a few days (when the local tower went down) and they gladly reversed the charges.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 09-05-2012, 08:24 AM:

Verizon ignores roaming charges here but there's also logic behind it: It's impossible to cross Lake Erie in five minutes.

You can't be talking on your phone linked to a cell site in Erie then to another site in Long Point, Ontario then back to a site in Erie all in the span of five minutes.

The shortest distance across the lake, between the tip of Presque Isle and Long Point is thirty-something miles. The average width is forty or fifty and the lake is over 200 miles long. There's just no way anybody can cover that distance in such a short time, even in a fast boat and probably not even in an airplane. (Even in a plane, turnaround time would be a factor.)

It makes logical sense that, when the billing department sees that a phone has roamed between sites that border Lake Erie that it couldn't have actually traveled that distance. The computers are probably programmed to ignore it, somehow.

So many phones, these days, have GPS chips built into them. I imagine that it would be possible for some kind of software to use GPS data and combine it with the list of sites a phone has linked up to in order to determine whether the phone is actually roaming or whether it's just picking up skip.

Posted by Mark Hajducki (Member # 1732) on 09-05-2012, 10:55 AM:

quote: Leo Enticknap
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.

Some passenger ships now have their own mobile phone masts onboard (which cost a hideous amount to use).

Posted by Rick Raskin (Member # 1561) on 09-05-2012, 04:19 PM:

My son was attending college in Bristol, Virginia before Verizon had national coverage. Bristol, TN wasn't in the Verizon coverage area then and he would often hook to a Tennessee tower. Verizon always forgave the roaming charges. Bristol, VA spans the VA/TN border with Bristol TN. One city; two states.

When I was in the Med last year the cruise ship had a CDMA tower that was $2.49/minute to use. I could usually pick up a land based GSM tower for a lot less money.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 09-06-2012, 12:33 AM:

quote: Tom Sauter
I explicity asked the rep about roaming charges and my call was escalated several times until I reached a manager who explained their policy: they ignore roaming charges within a reasonable distance of the US border.

I was wondering if that was the way they dealt with it - that certainly makes sense.

quote: Mark Hadjucki
Some passenger ships now have their own mobile phone masts onboard (which cost a hideous amount to use).

There are threats to put them on planes every so often, too. The Delta planes that have wifi onboard are bad enough! A couple of months ago I spent a fun-packed three hours sitting next to a lady who was having a loud Skype conversation from her tablet PC, talking in excruciating detail about her kid's illness, and specifically the diarrhoea it was causing him to have. Needless to say, the buy-on-board trolley did not do much business on that flight.