Maybe don't connect your phone to service when roaming?
Please do not take this article seriously, I have NOT done enough testing and you may run into additional charges. It is purely something that I was interested in and I tested with stuff that I wouldn't have gotten charged for anyways.
Roaming abroad. Most carriers make you pay absurdly high fees when going abroad. It can be as high as £7.20 to use a MB of data on O2 (based on prices for Mexico in this example where Teléfonica literally operates a network there).
The prices for having a holiday can be extremely absurd if you forget to apply the right bolt-ons, boosts or whatever your carrier calls it.
Sure, I would advise anyone to activate the £6 O2 Travel Bolt-on rather than using a MB of data by mistake, but what if you didn't have to pay and you could just use WiFi calling?
I wanted to put that to the test. I recently found out that Windscribe offers a Private Hotspot feature which I used for this and it is incredible. It is by far the easiest way to test this!
In order to conduct my tests, I turned on aeroplane mode to make sure that VoWiFi was active on my Virgin Media connection:
And then, we were off. I tried two countries in this experiment: Germany and the United States.
Before I continue, I should mention that obviously I was never connecting to another countries network during the test, I was doing this from my living room. I assume if you did do that, this wouldn't work. So you need to make sure that your SIM has no service before arriving in another country basically.
Anyways, back to the test. Germany is included in O2's Europe Zone roaming which comes free of charge with every plan so I started there first. Plus Teléfonica operates o2 - de as well!
Once I connected to my hotspot, I used ipinfo.io to make sure I was connected to my VPN and as you can see, it corresponds to Germany.
And, then I called 901 (voicemail number on O2). Worked flawlessly. Quality was about standard for AMR-NB. Here's a screenshot of it (I should have ideally had my browser still open in a window tbh).
And now America. You technically need the O2 Travel or Travel Inclusive Zone bolt-on to avoid charges here, which I do have. Rather than providing you another lengthy write-up, here's the two screenshots next to each other.
This is pretty cool that it works, I thought that O2 would have blocked this. Messages don't come through for VoWiFi for me (that's because it seems like my POCO X3 Pro doesn't support sending or receiving text messages via IMS) but I can confirm that I received no messages about roaming abroad which is good.
Before I leave, I must remind you that you shouldn't really take any of this information as advice. You may still get charged and it's not my fault. Some providers do allow WiFi calling when abroad but UK carriers don't support it.
Oh, could you also subscribe? Thanks.