Sky - Roaming charges

PHK

dredski said:

Just to clarify; roaming is turned off, someone tries to call you and it doesn't connect because roaming is off, they then leave a voicemail which you never receive because roaming is off? Sounds so shady!

Advice is; turn off voicemail (once you find out how).

It's not shady at all. In order for your provider to know that you are roaming your phone must have registered on the roaming network. 

Turning Roaming off will stop your phone making a data connection. To stop calls and texts you put the Airplane mode on 

When you are not connected to your hoke network it doesn't know whether your phone is on and whether it has signal. So when someone calls you they route the call to the network that you are roaming on. 

That network will then try to locate you. If it can't (eg you've turned it off or out of range) then it routes the call to your voicemail which is a UK number in the UK. You therefore pay for the call. 

It's always been like this for as long as roaming has existed. The advice has always been to buy a roaming add on, or turn on airplane and use only WiFi. 

I appreciate you've only just discovered it but that doesn't make it wrong. 

Sky even allow you to set a 0 spending cap that means you can incur charges. 

Personally, I buy a roaming bolt on. When you are spending thousands on travel  its worthwhile spending £20 to £50 pounds on being able to use your phone.

dredski

I did eventually set a zero cap on charges which explains why I didn't end up with double. Some of these calls were 'blocked' ones from the UK - random spam calls I'd blocked at home.

I'm not sure Sky has a 'bolt-on' for anything outside of their Passport Plus area, do they?

OK, on this forum it was suggested that turning voicemail off is a solution. For Sky, you can't turn it off completely but can turn off the ability for someone to leave a message - not convinced this would help but... 

Just off a call to Sky (India) and they have removed approximately 60% of my roaming charges. Good(ish) news then! 

Also they suggested that on arrival you should reset the network to change from the UK to the destination's. Also, not 100% convinced this would work but also worth a try & ties in with what @PHK suggests above.

Also no-one other than @PHK has suggested Airplane mode - which makes a lot of sense.

Next time, if nothing else changes I will be checking my bill online although I suspect I'll get a local SIM card and remove the problem that way. 

Anyone have any thoughts on this?