Question: I will be studying in Europe for four months and would like to know the best option in terms of my cellphone. I have a locked iPhone 6s and have service with Sprint. I need the phone to do everything.
_Lori Miller, Omaha, Neb.
Answer: The quick response is that Miller will be better off leaving behind her iPhone 6s and buying a phone in Europe.
She should not turn on her phone in another country and start using it. And she will need to take steps to ensure she doesn't come home to a gotcha gift in the form of a bill with roaming charges that would make a cow faint.
So Miller should do something. But there are obstacles to doing something with the phone she has:
_She has Sprint. Cellphones come in two types: CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) or GSM (Global System for Mobiles).
Sprint generally uses CDMA. AT&T and T-Mobile generally use GSM.
Most of the world uses GSM, which means Miller's phone may not work abroad.
_Her phone is locked. A locked phone usually means you still owe money on your instrument. Even if you own your phone outright, it may still be locked. You must ask your service provider to unlock it.
If you're free of your provider, you can buy a SIM card in the country you're in and use a local service provider to reduce your costs.
Miller's phone isn't unlocked so that isn't an option unless she can get Sprint to give her the keys to cellular freedom.
_She needs the phone to do everything. This could be the most expensive problem even if the phone works and is unlocked.
When you're in the U.S., your smartphone can do pretty much everything, including making and receiving calls and texts, taking photos and posting them to social media, using maps to guide you to wherever you're going, making airline or dinner reservations or letting you watch movies, read books or do banking, even washing dishes. OK, maybe not the last one, but you get the idea.
The issue for users, whether abroad or at home, is that they forget that they're consuming cellular data, and that can be expensive.
How expensive?
I have an unlocked phone, which means I can switch out the SIM card for a card that places my phone on an in-country network.
I didn't do that on a recent trip to China. I wanted people to reach me on my regular U.S. phone number. I wanted to text and have people recognize it was me.
I wanted to make my life easier. I did that, but it came at a price.
I bought the lowest-level international calling plan from my service provider (most providers have them), which happens to be AT&T.
It worked well _ for the first three days.
Then I received a text message saying I had burned through my cellular data and would be charged 25 cents for each additional megabyte.
There's a term for people like me, besides "stupid" and "oblivious": We are data hogs.
The average user consumes 1.4 GB of data a month, according to a June 6 story by Andrew Meola in the Business Insider's Tech Insider. (That number is expected to increase to 8.9 GB a month in five years, Meola said, citing the June Ericsson Mobility Report.)
My mistake: I bought a plan that offered only 200MB of cellular data.
After the fact, I used the AT&T data calculator to see how much I would use in a month.
Answer: a whole lot more than 200MB, which isn't much. I would be limited to about 1,000 emails (about a quarter could have attachments), about six hours of web surfing and about 50 social media posts.
Based on my user habits, the calculator told me I would use about 6 GB of data, across three devices, in a month's time.
If I were relying only on my phone, that would be 1.5 GB a week.
If you're planning to use your phone for everything, that's nothing.
In China, I was in trouble from the minute I said, "I'll take the $40 plan."
I still would have been in trouble with the $120-a-month plan (800 MB), which I eventually upgraded to. But even then it turned out to be expensive.
That's because I did not monitor my cellular data usage.
That's key to controlling costs, no matter which plan you're using, said Kelsey Sheehy, consumer expert at NerdWallet, a financial education/resource.
You can use your phone to monitor that. (On an iPhone, it's under Settings, then Cellular. Scroll to the bottom and hit reset Statistics.)
Unless you promise to hook up only to Wi-Fi and never use cellular except when it's absolutely necessary, Miller's best bet, Sheehy said, is "to get a local prepaid phone and get a package with a local carrier."
International calling plans work fine for a short trip (Sheehy likes Verizon's), but the locally owned/tethered option is "going to be less expensive in the long run," she said.
Even then, "my recommendations are to only use (cellular) data when you absolutely need to," she said.
"Save uploading pictures for when you are connected to Wi-Fi," she said. "Even turn your cellular data off when you get to the country."
While Miller is studying abroad, she'll be better off if she says so long to the iPhone. It's not a break-up, but data-ing others while she's away may benefit her, financially, in the long run.
