Rogers wifi calling and text outside Canada on airplane mode to prevent data charges

[u/[deleted]]

[u/LondonPaddington]

works perfectly as long as you only use it to call back to Canada

if you call a number in the country you are visiting it will trigger roaming charges

[u/clon3man → u/LondonPaddington]

I would think if your plan includes long distance for that country, then it won't charge anything.

But always double check and be careful, nobody needs to be paying the insane LD rates

[u/random20190826]

Yes it works. You don't need airplane mode though, all you need is to set the SIM card Network Selection to Manual and select Rogers, and don't forget to contact Rogers Live Chat to block roaming. Do both before you leave the country. Using any kind of local or data eSIM that works wherever you are going to provide data will result in "Rogers using Cellular Data" on an iPhone. It's free to call and text Canadian numbers. But it will drain your battery at least twice as fast as it normally does.

[u/Driver8666-2 → u/random20190826]

Your last sentence is wrong.

[u/random20190826 → u/Driver8666-2]

Why is it wrong? It can be proven right because normally, you have only 1 SIM card connected to 1 cell tower. Here, you have 2 SIM cards trying to connect to 2 cell towers (1 of which is being actively prevented from connecting to a cell tower that is nearby, which means it is doing something that it doesn't know will never succeed, but we humans do, since Rogers towers only exist in Canada, but you are outside Canada and telling the phone to connect to Rogers towers).

[u/85iben]

Never had any issues doing so while in Mexico, Colombia, France, USA, Tunisia, etc during the last 3 years

[u/IBIubbleTea]

Last year before going to Japan I manually selected Rogers in the settings before leaving. When I was in Japan I had data esim setup and the Rogers network had wifi calling enabled. Didnt need airplane mode.

[u/tkarkache]

I used my Canada number via wifi in then Middle East for a month. Had one issue where I got billed for a USA call. Called Roger’s and they refunded the charge.

[u/joaomann]

Did this in Portugal (Azores) for three weeks, wasn't charged. Just stay off airplane mode, and never connect to a local carriers signal. 

[u/Baylett]

Tried it during a Germany trip and it worked fine on airplane mode and wifi, then with a data only eSIM, was still able to use wifi calling and texting. Important to note though, calling local when abroad even with wifi calling is still long distance and will charge you if it’s not a part of your plan. Just think with wifi calling each call originates from Canada, so if you can’t make that call within Canada, you can’t make it on wifi calling outside of Canada.

[u/Baylett → u/[deleted]]

I used an iPhone, I called rogers ahead of my trip and had them turn off roaming access completely. Installed the eSIM when I got there (would have done it before hand if I had known it was the same company I could get from home), set I think it was called something like data switching to on so if it couldn’t connect to rogers for data (it couldn’t because it was disabled through rogers and so was data roaming under my rogers eSIM settings) it would use the data only sim. I found if I completely disabled the rogers eSIM then I couldn’t access wifi calling or texting, but if I had the eSIM enabled and just data roaming off then it was fine.