Charged International Roaming Even When Not Answering Calls!
Why is this happening? Just returned. Had my phone on. Never made or answered a call. Or even retrieved vm. I guess I'll just call CS and ask them politely to remove the charges.
T-Mobile has the best customer care agents and where is what you need to do. Call 611 from your handset or 1800- T Mobile from a landline. Say that you never answer these phone call and you never retieved the VM either but i got these charges onto my account while i was roaming and tell them to investigate these charges by filling a ABR Advance Billing Research form and ask them nicely that these are not u r charges. T-Mobile is best wireless company is situation like your's and they will look after it.
Let me know through PM what happened after u have talked with customer care.
It's in the terms and conditions that you agreed to with WorldClass.. it states that calls forwarded to voicemail will be billed double... as an incoming call and then the call is forwarded back to the voicemail system in the US. The way to avoid this, is before travel, have the voicemail disabled with T-mo.
This is the big "catch 22" of international roaming. If you don't answer the call, it gets forwarded back to your voicemail and you get bill for an international round-trip. Now, it used to be that we could avoid this round-trip billing by turning off the forwarding to voicemail (e.g. #004#), but a while back T-Mobile instituted DCF (Default Conditional Forwarding). Now, if you clear or disable your conditional forwarding the switch will reset it instantly.
The only two things you can do is to either forward all calls to voicemail or conditional forward for no answer and busy to a number that will never answer. The second one is problematic as many foreign carriers bill first and ask if it answered later.
Originally posted by DRNewcomb This is the big "catch 22" of international roaming. If you don't answer the call, it gets forwarded back to your voicemail and you get bill for an international round-trip. Now, it used to be that we could avoid this round-trip billing by turning off the forwarding to voicemail (e.g. #004#), but a while back T-Mobile instituted DCF (Default Conditional Forwarding). Now, if you clear or disable your conditional forwarding the switch will reset it instantly.
The only two things you can do is to either forward all calls to voicemail or conditional forward for no answer and busy to a number that will never answer. The second one is problematic as many foreign carriers bill first and ask if it answered later.
or go over to tech support to have DCF removed. not gonna promise the HLR won't readd it sometime in the future but we can remove it in the HLR if requested.
My experience has been that >>unconditional<< call forwarding can be set while roaming internationally. That'll modify your HLR to forward calls directly to VM without making the international round-trip.
it's better that way anyway, as many international systems don't forward the CID info correctly, which means your declined callers will never get to your outgoing VM message anyway.
As an aside, T-Mo has to fix this someday... It's way too troublesome...
Along these lines, when I go to Juarez, MX, often I receive charges for calls to voicemail when my phone never rings nor was there any message. Really very frustrating.
One problem is that one cannot deactivate call forwarding from the phone but must call customer care. Just not worth it for a 3 day trip, but a trip for more than 3 days out of the country, I will decactivate call forwarding. Either I answer my phone and get charged or I don't pay.
Originally posted by xalca or go over to tech support to have DCF removed. not gonna promise the HLR won't readd it sometime in the future but we can remove it in the HLR if requested.
Been there, done that. The HLR reset DCF within a week. Bottom line is that you can't count on getting DCF removed as a way to avoid these charges. I'm told that the entire switch has to either have DCF or not have DCF. I wish there were a "Techie" mode where the customer was give control.
I'm going to iceland and want to bring my phone in case of an emergency. If I just keep it off the entire time will I be charged for calls to my phone or VM when it was off? Like I said...I won't be using it (hopefully) but we are going off-road on 4wd's and would like to bring it just in case.
Originally posted by joako If you never turn the phone on, you wont have a problem.
IF you register on another network, and then turn off your phone, for how long will calls be forwarded there?
if you turn your phone off when you are still registered with the foreign network, calls will fairly instantaneously automatically be routed to voicemail and not make the international round trip. if, however, you are not registered with the network and you power your phone off, it could take up to 24 hours for the foreign system to release your phone, in which case the call goes abroad and back.
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