iPhone Abroad

Fyris river at dusk, Uppsala 2004

Since I'm going to be living and working in Uppsala, Sweden next academic year, I haven't yet pulled the trigger on an iPhone. The Apple device is sold locked to AT&T, and efforts to open it up to other GSM carriers haven't yet been successful.

This isn't to say that you can't use an iPhone abroad, however. AT&T has roaming agreements with GSM providers around the world: Vodaphone, Telia and 3 in Sweden. The problem comes when you start to add up the cost of using international roaming on a long-term basis. Let's assume you make a hour worth of phone calls a month (two 1-minute phone calls per day):

The roaming fee is assessed for every minute you talk -- those 450 minutes inherent in your plan don't count for anything.

Our grand total so far: $138 per month, for only an hour's worth of phone calls. For customers out of the country on a long-term basis, AT&T does have a special deal to cut down the cost. This involves signing up for World Traveler. Luckily, Sweden is one of the 20 (only?) countries in this program. You pay an additional fee to get a reduced international roaming rate:

That's saved us a grand total of $10, but obviously the more you talk (and roam) the better the deal gets, as the $6 monthly fee is balanced out by the 30¢ per minute reduction in roaming charges.

Let's take a look at data next. The iPhone's mandatory $20/month unlimited data plan, which is contained within the $40 Nation 450 minute plan above, doesn't give you anything when you're abroad. You'll be charged 2¢ per kilobyte, which means fetching an email with a 1megabyte attachment costs $20.50. And a streaming YouTube video with a few megabytes of data could turn into a $100 experience. Ouch. I won't even bother adding that to the total as the figures get obscene pretty quickly.

Very recently (as in this week) AT&T started to offer an International Data Roaming Plan for the iPhone:

What's really galling is that the true cost of this extremely limited, metered data service is more like $45/month, since you have to include the cost of the iPhone's mandatory $20/month "unlimited' data which is only good in the USA.

Since the iPhone can't be set to retrieve headers only with either IMAP or POP3 (somebody please correct me if I'm wrong,) and since there are a lot of reports that disabling GPRS/EDGE isn't really exposed as a UI option, the only safe solution would seem to be either not setup email at all, set it up on a special account that nobody knows about and have back-end filters forward important mail to there, and/or disable automatic email checking, relying on a manual email check that you can activate when you know you're on a WiFi hotspot.

The other question going through my head is where there are any "vampire" data services outside of email that suck up data kilobytes without your knowledge. I understand the RSS reader solution for the iPhone is a webpage hosted on Apple's servers, so obviously checking feeds won't trigger an EDGE connection. And apparently the "Stocks" app only updates prices when you launch it. (If I get an iPhone, the only ticker symbols I'm putting are going to be 3G data providers...)

But the Weather widget documentation doesn't say either way. And according to those familiar with the phone, the "Visual Voicemail" system does use the GPRS system to update the iPhone's index of who's called and left you a message. (This surprises me -- I would have thought they would use special machine-readable SMS messages.)

The final piece of the puzzle is those communication forms that lie somewhere between voice and data: SMS and MMS. Luckily the iPhone doesn't support the latter, despite its built-in camera. Unlike my pre-Cingular old AT&T plan, which offered free incoming messages (a boon for services such as Dodgeball,) the 'new' AT&T apparently treats incoming as part of the same limited number: 200 for the Nation 450 plan. At least incoming are counted as part of those 200 when abroad -- outgoing are an additional 50¢ each.

But that's just the technological aspect of the SMS system, not the social. Presumably Europeans will be paying a bunch more to send an SMS to my American phone number, which is a somewhat unfortunate disincentive. And with metered (and expensive) data, checking email or webmail is not the workaround for pay-per-text SMS systems that it otherwise would be.

So let's sum this all up: I'm looking at $151/month for a phone that with an hour of talktime, 20 megs of data transfer, and an American area code that makes it extremely inconvenient for Swedes to call or SMS me on. (Of course, given how much calls cost a minute, the fewer conversations I have on the iPhone the better.) On the plus side, the same number I've had since 2003 will continue to work, and Americans can reach me by dialing a 206 number.

What might be the deciding factor is the range and ubiquity of university/private WiFi networks in Uppsala. My researcher apartment is right next to a Waynes Coffee, which is sort of the Starbucks of Sweden, complete with tie-in to 802.11 provider (Telia Homerun in this case.) And as the above link shows, the Uppsala academic wireless network looks to be well-developed and present in a wide variety of academic buildings.

So the question remains: just how much money, and how little functionality, is it worth to send the gadget-obsessed Swedes into fits of envy?

Footnote: Though linked above (as "Ouch,") I wanted to give some extra mention to Felix Salmon's excellent write-up of the trauma of iPhone international roaming. Though I found his post about 80% of the way through writing this one, he has the best and clearest survey of what the lay of the land is for international roamers with this phone right now. He's also got some great tips on how to use the phone with WiFi as the main (or only) data connection.