Canada trip

[buhnanas]

I have Cingular Nation and am going into Canada for a week next month...will my phone work and will I be roaming?

[RITMarketer]

I work for a Cingular agent, and from everything I hear it seems that your phone will not work, and, if it does, you will be roaming.

The only possibility is that if you're by the border (i.e. in Niagara Falls, etc.) you may be able to tag a US tower, but there's no definite to that.

Cingular Nation is just that, the US, so, unless you want to get hit w/roaming charges, your best bet is to shut the phone off for the trip and check voicemail from the land.

[ZaphodB]

RITMarketer, I hate to rain on your parade, but...

First of all, I don't know whether the enquiring user has TDMA or GSM. If he (or she) has TDMA, there is roaming but only on analog and it is quite expensive ($1 a minute, I believe). The good thing, though, is that like the US, analog covers a great deal of rural Canada.

If he/she has GSM, the roaming will be either on Fido (display will say Microcell), which is expensive (check for my post on Microcell and their ripoff policies a month or two back), or on Rogers AT&T (this is most of Alberta's coverage), which is expensive but not the same bend-over-and-take-it-like-a-man price structure set by Fido.

You are partially right. Roaming can be expensive. AT&T have Canada add-on plans and T-Mobile have reduced rates available. However, saying "you will not have coverage" is not accurate because you don't really know where the person is going nor what kind of Cingular he/she has.

As far as coverage, I have found GSM coverage in the major Canadian cities and their suburbs (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg, etc.) to be excellent and their coverage outside of major cities (and the province of Alberta, who have spent millions of loonies on technology) to be essentially non-existent.