Traveling with Easy Roam

The costly dangers of Telus EasyRoam

Telus advertises a package for roaming outside Canada, for example3 $14/day in the US. Conversely you can use pay as you go with the following rates: Airtime: $1.60/minute,Messaging: $0.75/message (incoming SMS is free) and Data: $5/MB (very expensive).

I found out the hard way just how expensive EasyRoam can be on recent trip to the US. I got charged $126 for 9 days (plus tax) when for most of the days I only sent one or two texts.

If you plan to use a lot of data and airtime EasyRoam might make sense but beware of the realities. Assuming that you are satisfied using WIFI for data  then EasyRoam will be very expensive. For example if you receive one text on any given day and respond, instead of paying 75 cents you pay $14. Similarly if you answer a call for less than 1 minute its $14 instead of $1.60.

The Telus agent informed me that any day that your use Telus services (phone, text or data-on celluar) using EasyRoam its $14 even for one text or phone call. He suggested turning on Airplane mode to avoid these very expensive charges from happening – but of course this blocks any incoming texts or calls, hardly practical in todays world.

The only way to prevent such charges is to remove EasyRoam from you account and only turn it on each day that you really need it.