Technologies

Traveling Abroad This Summer? Here Are the Best Tips to Avoid Roaming Phone Charges

International travel is exciting — until you get roaming fees. Abide by these tips to keep using phone apps and data stress-free on your trip.

Modern smartphones makes international travel a breeze compared to the old days. The Android or iOS supercomputer in your pocket has all the downloadable apps and included features to smoothly reserve hotel rooms, navigate cities, translate signage through the camera and pay for goods and services. With the latest software upgrades, you can translate conversations in real time with AI-powered features and even ask your AI-powered assistants for travel tips.

All those fancy phone features and apps work best — and sometimes only work — with a data connection. While that’s covered by your domestic plan, it usually comes with extra roaming fees when you travel abroad. Here’s how to avoid those charges.

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First and foremost, you’ll want to understand how pricey those extra charges are or whether you’ll be traveling to a region that’s cheaper or free with your carrier. Some mobile carriers have partnered with carriers in other countries for more affordable roaming or even free service, albeit with some restrictions. For example, some plans — like T-Mobile’s Essentials — offer free service in Canada and Mexico, but only at slow, 2G- or 3G-like speeds. So don’t expect to stream much video on that connection.

But traveling to most countries will require you to pay mobile roaming charges if you try to use data services, make voice calls or send text messages on your phone as normal. If that’s your plan, check out our guide for the best travel phone plans.

If you want to avoid mobile roaming charges, keep the following tips in mind.

Set up mobile service before you leave

Some carriers will let you pick traveling service options ahead of time, which can include daily, weekly or monthly flat fees to get service from partner carriers in other countries. You can wait until you arrive at your destination and wait to be prompted to select your chosen service or you can set it up ahead of time. Note that some carriers will simply default you to these services rather than charge you higher roaming fees, although it’s worth confirming before you travel.

These international plans are pretty convenient, although some may come with caveats such as being deprioritized behind other carrier customers, meaning you’ll get slower speeds during peak traffic times. Check the fine print of each travel plan to know its restrictions and what you may need to pay for extra service.

Verizon’s international plans start pretty simply, with $10 a day getting you 2GB per day of high-speed data and unlimited 3G-speeds data thereafter, as well as free voice calls and texting, in more than 210 countries. That plan is discounted to $5 per day in Canada and Mexico.

If you have one of the carrier’s latest plans, known as Unlimited Plus and Unlimited Welcome, you’ll get these features included for Canada and Mexico. Customers with Verizon’s top Unlimited Ultimate option will get this international data for Canada and Mexico as well as for more than 210 countries.

AT&T has a similar $10-per-day travel plan for unlimited data, voice calls and text. The data counts against your usual plan’s allowance; going over will result in a charge and/or reduced download speeds of a super slow 2G-like connection. If you don’t sign up for this plan, traditional roaming fees kick in, charging per text message, megabyte of data and minute of voice calling.

Unlimited data for Canada and Mexico is included in AT&T’s main Unlimited plans, while the carrier’s Unlimited Premium PL and Unlimited Elite plans also allow unlimited data in 20 Latin American countries.

T-Mobile has its own international plans with unlimited calling, but they’re pretty modest with data, starting at $5 per day for half a gigabyte of downloaded data. Keep in mind that the carrier’s standard plans also include some international data allowances.

The basic Magenta and Go5G plans offer up to 10GB of high-speed data a month in Canada and Mexico, and once that’s used up, get unlimited data at very slow 2G speeds (as previously mentioned, the cheapest Essentials plan only gets data in Canada and Mexico at 2G speeds). Go5G Next, Go5G Plus and Magenta Max plans have a small 5GB monthly travel allowance for high-speed data in more than 215 countries, although that’s subject to potential extra taxes and conditions. Standard Go5G plans get the same 5GB data allowance in 11 European countries.

Although it’s possible to bump up your plan for the month (or more) you’re traveling and return to your old plan thereafter, it’s likely simpler to just pay for international data.

Getting mobile service directly from a local carrier

Before carriers got friendlier with their international agreements to support each other’s customers, one of the better traveling strategies was to get service straight from the carrier in the country you were traveling in. Once you landed, you’d just walk into a local carrier’s retail store and get a prepaid SIM card to last you the length of your trip.

That’s still possible today but it’s a bit more complicated. If you have one of the many phones that lack a physical SIM slot, including the latest iPhone 15 series and Samsung Galaxy S24 series, you’ll have to register for service through one of the eSIM accounts on your device. It’s pretty easy to do and is in fact one of the benefits of having multiple digital eSIM slots — so you can have one for domestic use and one for traveling — but it requires you to register through the carrier in question. You can even load the eSIM before you travel, through apps such as Airalo and Ubigi.

Unfortunately, there’s something else to consider: whether your phone is unlocked, that is, not tied to a carrier and restricted in using eSIMs from other carriers (even international ones). If you bought your device unlocked, you’re in the clear.

If you’re paying off your phone in installments from your carrier, it’s complicated. Verizon users have it best, as their installment plans unlock phones after 60 days. AT&T and T-Mobile, however, require you to finish your installments and fully pay off your phone to unlock it. Because AT&T’s plans have a minimum of 36 monthly installments, customers may be out of luck getting a local carrier eSIM unless they’re nearing the end of their contract — in which case it may make sense to pay the balance for more travel freedom.

Relying on a hotspot and tethering

Another method to avoid roaming is a bit more roundabout and requires you to sign up for service with a local carrier anyway but you won’t have to fiddle with eSIMs. When you land in your country of travel, you can rent a mobile hotspot (or register service on one you already own), which is a handheld device that turns cell signals into Wi-Fi.

Note that you’ll still need to pay for service either from the hotspot maker or from a local carrier, and there’s no guarantee that their networks will play nicely with a given hotspot device. Check that it’ll work in the area you’re traveling to.

Once you have one set up, you just connect to the hotspot’s Wi-Fi using your phone as normal. While it’s a bit more cumbersome, this also lets you get internet for your other devices, such as tablets and laptops, pretty much anywhere you get a phone signal from a local carrier.

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Another caveat is that you’ll need to keep the hotspot itself charged, which is another device battery you’ll have to worry about. It might be worth carrying an external battery to make sure your hotspot can last a full day while you’re out and about.

Ultimately, whatever option you choose should fit your travel habits and destinations. Some carrier partnership options will be more appealing but offer slower speeds than getting service straight from the local carrier. But don’t worry about getting locked into a choice: You can always try out one way when you arrive and switch to another if a better choice presents itself.

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Technologies

This $20K Humanoid Robot Promises to Tidy Your Home. But There Are Strings Attached

The new Neo robot from 1X is designed to do chores. It’ll need help from you — and from folks behind the curtain.

It stands 5 feet, 6 inches tall, weighs about as much as a golden retriever and costs near the price of a brand-new budget car.

This is Neo, the humanoid robot. It’s billed as a personal assistant you can talk to and eventually rely on to take care of everyday tasks, such as loading the dishwasher and folding laundry.

Neo doesn’t work cheap. It’ll cost you $20,000. And even then, you’ll still have to train this new home bot, and possibly need a remote assist as well.

If that sounds enticing, preorders are now open (for a mere $200 down). You’ll be signing up as an early adopter for what Neo’s maker, a California-based company called 1X, is calling a «consumer-ready humanoid.» That’s opposed to other humanoids under development from the likes of Tesla and Figure, which are, for the moment at least, more focused on factory environments.

Neo is a whole order of magnitude different from robot vacuums like those from Roomba, Eufy and Ecovacs, and embodies a long-running sci-fi fantasy of robot maids and butlers doing chores and picking up after us. If this is the future, read on for more of what’s in store.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

What the Neo robot can do around the house

The pitch from 1X is that Neo can do all manner of household chores: fold laundry, run a vacuum, tidy shelves, bring in the groceries. It can open doors, climb stairs and even act as a home entertainment system.

Neo appears to move smoothly, with a soft, almost human-like gait, thanks to 1X’s tendon-driven motor system that gives it gentle motion and impressive strength. The company says it can lift up to 154 pounds and carry 55 pounds, but it is quieter than a refrigerator. It’s covered in soft materials and neutral colors, making it look less intimidating than metallic prototypes from other companies.

The company says Neo has a 4-hour runtime. Its hands are IP68-rated, meaning they’re submersible in water. It can connect via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 5G. For conversation, it has a built-in LLM, the same sort of AI technology that powers ChatGPT and Gemini.

The primary way to control the Neo robot will be by speaking to it, just as if it were a person in your home.

Still, Neo’s usefulness today depends heavily on how you define useful. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern got an up-close look at Neo at 1X’s headquarters and found that, at least for now, it’s largely teleoperated, meaning a human often operates it remotely using a virtual-reality headset and controllers.

«I didn’t see Neo do anything autonomously, although the company did share a video of Neo opening a door on its own,» Stern wrote last week.

1X CEO Bernt Børnich told her that Neo will do most things autonomously in 2026, though he also acknowledged that the quality «may lag at first.»

The company’s FAQ says that for any chore request Neo doesn’t know how to accomplish, «you can schedule a 1X Expert to guide it» to help the robot «learn while getting the job done.»

What you need to know about Neo and privacy

Part of what early adopters are signing up for is to let Neo learn from their environment so that future versions can operate more independently.

That learning process raises privacy and trust questions. The robot uses a mix of visual, audio and contextual intelligence — meaning it can see, hear and remember interactions with users throughout their homes.

«If you buy this product, it is because you’re OK with that social contract,» Børnich told the Journal. «It’s less about Neo instantly doing your chores and more about you helping Neo learn to do them safely and effectively.»

Neo’s reliance on human operation behind the scenes prompted a response from John Carmack, a computer industry luminary known for his work with VR systems and the lead programmer of classic video games including Doom and Quake.

«Companies selling the dream of autonomous household humanoid robots today would be better off embracing reality and selling ‘remote operated household help’,» he wrote in a post on the X social network (formerly Twitter) on Monday.

1X says it’s taking steps to protect your privacy: Neo listens only when it recognizes it’s being addressed, and its cameras will blur out humans. You can restrict Neo from entering or viewing specific areas of your home, and the robot will never be teleoperated without owner approval, the company says.

But inviting an AI-equipped humanoid to observe your home life isn’t a small step.

The first units will ship to customers in the US in 2026. There is a $499 monthly subscription alternative to the $20,000 full-purchase price, though that will be available at an unspecified later date. A broader international rollout is promised for 2027.

Neo’s got a long road ahead of it to live up to the expectations set by Rosie the Robot in The Jetsons way back when. But this is no Hanna-Barbera cartoon. What we’re seeing now is a much more tangible harbinger of change.

Technologies

I Wish Nintendo’s New Switch 2 Zelda Game Was an Actual Zelda Game

Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment has great graphics, a great story and Zelda is actually in it. But the gameplay makes me wish for another true Zelda title instead.

I’ve never been a Hyrule Warriors fan. Keep that in mind when I say that Nintendo’s new Switch 2-exclusive Zelda-universe game has impressed me in several ways, but the gameplay isn’t one of them. Still, this Zelda spinoff has succeeded in showing off the Switch 2’s graphics power. Now can we have a true Switch 2 exclusive Zelda game next?

The upgraded graphics in Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild has made the Switch 2 a great way to play recent Zelda games, which had stretched the Switch’s capabilities to the limit before. And they’re both well worth revisiting, because they’re engrossing, enchanting, weird, epic wonders. Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, another in the Koei-Tecmo developed spinoff series of Zelda-themed games, is a prequel to Tears of the Kingdom. It’s the story of Zelda traveling back in time to ancient Hyrule, and the origins of Ganondorf’s evil. I’m here for that, but a lot of hack and slash battles are in my way.

A handful of hours in, I can say that the production values are wonderful. The voices and characters and worlds feel authentically Zelda. I feel like I’m getting a new chapter in the story I’d already been following. The Switch 2’s graphics show off smooth animation, too, even when battles can span hundreds of enemies.

But the game’s central style, which is endless slashing fights through hordes of enemies, gets boring for me. That’s what Hyrule Warriors is about, but the game so far feels more repetitive than strategic. And I just keep button-mashing to get to the next story chapter. For anyone who’s played Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, expect more of the same, for the most part.

I do like that the big map includes parts in the depths and in the sky, mirroring the tri-level appeal of Tears of the Kingdom. But Age of Calamity isn’t a free-wandering game. Missions open up around the map, each one opening a contained map to battle through. Along the way, you unlock an impressive roster of Hyrule characters you can control.

As a Switch 2 exclusive to tempt Nintendo fans to make the console upgrade, it feels like a half success. I admire the production values, and I want to keep playing just to see where the story goes. But as a purchase, it’s a distant third to Donkey Kong Bananza and Mario Kart World.

Hyrule Warriors fans, you probably know what you’re probably in for, and will likely get this game regardless. Serious Zelda fans, you may enjoy it just for the story elements alone.

As for me? I think I’ll play some more, but I’m already sort of tuning the game out a bit. I want more exploration, more puzzles, more curiosity. This game’s not about that. But it does show me how good a true next-gen Zelda could be on the Switch 2, whenever Nintendo decides to make that happen.