Device manufacturers aren’t the only companies that show up at Mobile World Congress. Carriers are there too. At&t is one of those carriers and they just recently announced today that they would be launching the capability to roam while using their LTE data in more countries then they offered previously. Not only is At&t still the only carrier to offer global LTE Roaming, but they have opened the service to travelers in new regions, which although costly, is still useful. In total they have launched LTE roaming in 15 different countries out of the 200 that they have agreements with, and 13 of those countries are new as of this morning. At&t plans to roll out LTE roaming services for its customers to all of the 200 countries on its list eventually, but it will still take some time to get that all done.
Now this is definitely some great news for those At&t customers who need roaming and are often traveling outside their home country, but roaming is still fairly costly and the addition of more countries won’t make it any cheaper. So far At&t hasn’t given any pricing on what it costs to use LTE roaming in any of the 13 new markets it launched it in today, but we’re sure that will come soon enough. Currently the new markets that now allow for LTE roaming are Spain, France, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, Guam, and Antigua & Barbuda. Canada and the UK were the first two counties where At&t customers saw LTE roaming become available, rounding out the number to 15. At&t has plans to roll out the roaming service to work in more countries over time. At&t aims to help travelers with their international roaming in another way then just providing the use of the data. They want to make sure that their customers have an easy way to find out any information they need about LTE roaming and have delivered an international roaming app that customers can download. The app allows customers to ask questions about international roaming so they can always get the right answer, as well as tracks their message and data usage making it easy to stay on top of roaming limits. Past that, it also provides information on current international roaming packages. It sounds like a must have app for the would be traveler on At&t’s network.