Rogers has been in the news lately, but mostly because it has been raising prices and lowering or eliminating the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) benefits. One of most popular packages they sell is the Roam Like Home services, which allows customers to use their minutes, text and data buckets in foreign countries as if they were still in Canada. What is nice is that it only costs a subscriber $5 a day, max 10 days per cycle. It started in the US, but then quickly rolled out to dozens of countries in Europe, South America and the Caribbean – according to Rogers they are up to over 75 countries. According to documents obtained by MobileSyrup Rogers will be expanding their Roam Like Home to over 100 countries starting January 27th.
A nice feature of the Roam Like Home option is that if you are in a Share Everything plan, Rogers only charges you a maximum of 10 days per billing cycle. This means you could get 21 days for ‘free’ rather than having to pay for the entire month – $50 maximum. You are only charged for days (24-hour period) when you use your phone in the US, so if you skip making or receiving a phone call on a particular day, there is no charge. Since there is no charge unless you use the services, you can enroll all lines on your plan so everybody on your plan can access Roam Like Home by turning data roaming to ‘on.’ Rogers has other Talk and Text Travel Packs available for countries that do not offer the Roam Like Home Service.
While Rogers’ Roam Like Home has a large presence in certain parts of the world, many popular tourist countries lack the coverage, so we hope that Rogers will expand to those regions. For instance, Rogers currently does not offer Roam Like Home in popular Japan and South Korea, nor do they offer it in ‘backpacker’ friendly, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Some other major holes exist throughout the world, including Australia, New Zealand, Russia, India, Pakistan as well was others. We will have to wait until tomorrow to find out exactly what new countries are being added. It is nice to see that Rogers is continuing to ink roaming deals with all of these other countries – it certainly makes traveling with your mobile devices much easier and cheaper.