iPhone picking up international cell towers with AT&T

[Irock619]

So I am working near the Mexico boarder and my iPhone 4S randomly picked up Mexico's cell phone towers. The AT&T symbol changed to Telecom and I had an "o" where it usually says 3G. My question is, why did my phone do this? I thought the phone had to be unlocked to use internationally. The scary thing is that I had to call AT&T to have them disable the data roaming feature from my account not knowing that my phone would do this automatically. I hope my next bill is not hundreds of dollars.

 

[greg555]

If you have Data Roaming turned off it shouldn't use foreign towers for data.

 

[Irock619]

If you have Data Roaming turned off it shouldn't use foreign towers for data.

It was still picking up the towers. I thought the phone had to be unlocked for it to work. Am I wrong?

 

[Diode]

It was still picking up the towers. I thought the phone had to be unlocked for it to work. Am I wrong?

It has to be unlocked to accept a foreign sim. Roaming on a foreign network can be done with a normal at&t sim.

 

[Irock619]

It has to be unlocked to accept a foreign sim. Roaming on a foreign network can be done with a normal at&t sim.

Ok so the phone will work anywhere in the world but you would have to pay the price, unless you get a foreign sim and unlock it correct?

 

[chrisu91]

Ok so the phone will work anywhere in the world but you would have to pay the price, unless you get a foreign sim and unlock it correct?

Correct. Go to your network settings and select AT&T instead of Automatic to avoid charges.

 

[Irock619]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Ok thanks guys!

 

[Small White Car]

Others mentioned it, but I didn't see you say if you absolutely did this or not yet.

Did you get this turned off?

 

[parseckadet]

That circle symbol represents GPRS data, which is the precursor to Edge. You could also think of it as 1G data. This is a connection which is slower than dial-up internet access, so even though any data you may have used would be billed at the international roaming rate, I doubt that you would be able to rack up much of a bill that way. Especially since it sounds like you were on top of things and called AT&T right away. Of course, as Small White Car pointed out, if you turn off data roaming on your phone then you won't have to worry about this at all.

 

[Irock619]

That circle symbol represents GPRS data, which is the precursor to Edge. You could also think of it as 1G data. This is a connection which is slower than dial-up internet access, so even though any data you may have used would be billed at the international roaming rate, I doubt that you would be able to rack up much of a bill that way. Especially since it sounds like you were on top of things and called AT&T right away. Of course, as Small White Car pointed out, if you turn off data roaming on your phone then you won't have to worry about this at all.

Yeah I had that turned off the whole time. I was just worried when my phone said Telecom and my co workers told me that is Mexico cell towers. Thanks for the info I appreciate it.

 

[wordoflife]

If you get charged for international data, you can just call AT&T and explain to them what happened. And yeah, for the future, just disable international data.