What Is Data Roaming?

Data roaming occurs when your phone disconnects from your carrier's network and hops on another network. 

For example, let's say you take a trip across the pond to London. You get off the plane, and like magic, you have signal bars to call a Lyft driver to pick you up from old Heathrow Airport. This happens because your wireless carrier has an agreement in place with a network in England to provide you with roaming service. If you have the roaming feature turned on, all of this will happen automatically.

What you pay for roaming charges will depend on your carrier, but plan for roaming charges to breakdown somewhat like this:

• $0.25 per minute while talking on the phone.
• $0.10 cents per text message.
• $2-$5 per MB of data.

Needless to say, it is way too expensive to rely on roaming data during your, well, roaming. Seriously, no matter what carrier you use, those roaming rates will quickly add up and you might just rack up $13,000 in roaming fees without even knowing it.

Before you venture out into an area outside your coverage boundaries, make sure you know what your carrier offers for travel. You don't want to accidentally exceed your allowed data usage, especially with international roaming.

Here's what you need to know about traveling with the four major wireless carriers.

Verizon's TravelPass works in more than 210 countries. It costs $5 a line for TravelPass access in Mexico and Canada and $10 for access in the other 210 countries. And good news for any customers with Verizon's unlimited phone plans, roaming in Canada and Mexica is included in your plan. The TravelPass allows you to use your normal Verizon cell phone plan abroad without incurring any extra fees.

It's just like your normal phone plan came with you on your trip. So, if you have unlimited data at home, you'll continue to have unlimited data on your trip, and man, that will come in handy.

T-Mobile is the best wireless carrier for traveling perks. In fact, you might not need to buy a data pass at all. If you have T-Mobile's Magenta plan or above, you get 5GB of premium unlimited data and unlimited standard data and texting in over 210 countries automatically included with your plan. You'll still have to pay $0.25 per minute for making calls while roaming.

Each T-Mobile plan also comes with T-Mobile TRAVEL, which gets T-Mobile users savings on select services like hotels and car rentals when you book on T-MobileTravel.com.

For those of you who don't have an unlimited plan with T-Mobile, you can opt for an International Pass. Here's how the pricing breaks down for the T-Mobile data passes.

• $5 International 1 Day Pass
  • 512MB of high-speed data
  • Unlimited calling in 210+ locations
  • Smartphone mobile hotspot
• $35 International 10-Day Pass
  • 5GB of high-speed data
  • Unlimited calling in 210+ locations
  • Smartphone Mobile Hotspot
• $50 International 30-Day Pass
  • 15GB of data
  • Unlimited calling in 210+ locations
  • Smartphone Mobile Hotspot

Similar to Verizon, AT&T doesn't have any built-in perks for roaming, so you'll need to buy a travel pass to avoid heavy roaming fees. The AT&T International Day Pass℠ costs you $10 per day, $5 per additional line, and comes with these perks:

• Access to your data
• Unlimited texts to the world
• Unlimited calls to the U.S.
• Unlimited calls to 210+ destinations

I actually used the AT&T day pass while traveling to Europe and it worked beautifully. I was able to use my maps app everywhere and rely on Yelp for everything I ate.

You can always turn off the roaming feature on your phone to make sure your phone doesn't use any roaming data without you knowing about it.

1. Go to your Settings.

2. Tap the Cellular option.

3. Tap Cellular Data Options.

4. Toggle the Data Roaming option off.

1. Tap Settings.

2. Tap Connections.

3. Tap Mobile Networks.

4. Toggle the switch to turn Data Roaming Access off.