More on iPhone Roaming

Seems like Piers isn’t the only one with exorbitant charges related to international roaming with the iPhone.

The IHT reports:

When Neil Dingman recently went on a vacation to Europe, he took his iPhone with him, with no intention of using it much. In fact, for the 14 days he was there, he used it only a handful of times and expected to see just a small increase in his next bill for roaming charges.

Instead, he was charged $852.31.

As it turned out, the cellphone carried by Dingman, a mortgage consultant in Minneapolis, made calls on a European data network several times each hour to check for e-mail messages. Because he did not deactivate the feature that automatically checks for e-mail, during Dingman’s trip through Italy, Croatia and Malta, the phone went to retrieve e-mail more than 500 times.

In addition, there are also reports of customers being charged for Wi-Fi data use:

In July, Aaron Oxley took his new iPhone with him to London, Dubai and Bangkok. Oxley said he was aware that there would be international roaming data charges, so he always made sure he was in an area with free Wi-Fi when he used his iPhone to access the Internet. But when Oxley’s AT&T bill arrived, the data charges totaled $300.

When Oxley called AT&T, he was told that even though he was using Wi-Fi, there was still a data transfer charge.

“There was nothing in their literature or on their Web site that said customers will be charged for using free Wi-Fi while overseas,” Oxley said.

AT&T claims that each international roaming dispute is being investigated on a case-by-case basis. To be on the safe side, it seems best to call the carrier to discuss setting up your account to keep data charges minimzed while travelling overseas.