Verizon offers new international rate plans, but still not great

It’s been a few years since I traveled overseas, but the last and firmest admonition I received was to remember to TURN OFF THE DATA ROAMING ON MY IPHONE!!  There are no shortage of people who have returned from trips abroad who were blissfully using their phone like normal and came back to a phone bill that exceeded the monthly mortgage payment on a shopping center.  International phone and data usage is exorbitantly expensive.

The suggestion is to turn off data roaming and turn off cellular data.  Hell, the simplest solution is to not even turn it on, unless you happen to be using an unlocked device in which case you can readily pop your US phone card out and replace it with one from the local market that gives you a local number and local usage rates.

Verizon Wireless announced that starting the last week in April, they will sell 100 MB of data for $25.  On a recent trip to the Caribbean, every time the ship I was on came into port and I flipped on my phone, AT&T’s local carrier of choice cheerfully sent me a message reminding me that if I wanted to use my data, that was fine, to the tune of $19.97 per megabyte.  If you wondered why I didn’t do much picture posting from my trip, at $60-$80 a full resolution picture…yeah, no.

Absent going the route of getting a plan, Verizon charges $20.48/MB, or $20,000 PER GIGABYTE.  Now, where did I put that aspirin again?