T-Mobile prepares to hike rates for international roaming calls

When you’re travelling internationally, and want to make sure your phone will keep you connected, you basically have two options: temporarily get yourself an international SIM (or eSIM), or rely upon your existing carrier’s international roaming support. While that latter option might involve making the least effort, it can also prove surprisingly expensive — and it’s only getting more so for T-Mobile users.

Right now, T-Mobile’s international roaming offers unlimited texting, and varying levels of high-speed data (depending on your plan), but voice calls are pay-as-you-go, and billed at a rate of $0.25 a minute.

Over on Reddit’s T-Mobile sub, though, a subscriber shares the message they’ve received from the carrier, warning them that their international call rates are just about to double:

Another Redditor chimes in down in the comments, confirming that they’ve also received a similar notice upon arriving in Italy. It appears that T-Mobile may have only just recently started notifying users of this change, as those who traveled just a few days earlier didn’t get any message like this.

So far, though, we haven’t found any official confirmation of the new pricing on T-Mobile’s website, so it’s unclear exactly what kind of impact we’re looking at — will this apply to subscribers on all different plan types, across all international destinations? We’ve reached out to the carrier directly in the hopes of clarifying exactly how this change is happening, but have yet to hear anything back.

Even though we’re only talking about pennies a minute, doubling the price is still doubling the price, and we wouldn’t be surprised if a whole of of T-Mobile users traveling internationally might start reconsidering their approach to voice calls. Instead, this change feels far more likely to impact subscribers who weren’t planning to make a lot of voice calls abroad in the first place, and find themselves scrambling to deal with some sudden emergency.