International Phone Use

[Tony_S]

I was wondering if anyone on RMweb knows the answer to this strange phone behaviour. We are on holiday in Austria. My son has a Sony X10 mini pro mobile phone. It is set for roaming (it is also on a pay monthly contract). He can send and receive texts and receive voice calls but is unable to make calls. We have trawled the T mobile website and the internet generally and can only find vague explanations of "network" issues. When a call is attempted the network just says in German and English that this call is not permitted.

Any ideas gratefully accepted!

My phone on O2 is roaming on T mobile Austria and works perfectly so it isn't a signal issue!

Best wishes

Tony

[Gwiwer]

On one of our trips to the UK we used T Mobile to purchase a UK SIM card for the Australian mobile which has international roaming set up through Optus. We found no end of problems. The biggest hurdle seemed to be that despite the SIM being correctly fitted and allowing us to receive calls we were not able to make calls. We also received a message that the call was "Not permitted".

 

A return visit to the store - and luckily we were still nearby when this issue was discovered - revealed the apparently unadvertised fact that while we had correctly followed the online initialisation process for the UK SIM we had not "changed the default permissions". We were never advised of this at time of sale and were told we would therefore either have to buy a second SIM or simply accept "our" error.

 

Not being keen to accept either option since there was no error on our part but rather a failure or omission on the part of the retailer (not to mention nothing on the online part of the process to suggest we had to set permissions) we stood our ground until a new SIM was supplied to us free of charge and initialised there and then to prove (1) that it worked and (2) that nowhere in the process did it require us to set permissions. That - it turned out - was done through the handset but was not prompted anywhere. It required prior knowledge or an inspired guess to perform.

 

I wonder if your case is in any way similar.

 

The T Mobile store in question was very reluctant to offer us any assistance until we suggested this might be a scam they were running and that we would be quite happy to advertise the fact on every travel blog and site we could find. At which point they suddenly became extremely co-operative .....

 

We have since been advised by a few friends who have also had various service provision issues to avoid T Mobile.

[Kris]

The information you have given shows that roaming is set up on the phone (if it wasn't you would not be able to receive the calls or send the texts). It might be worth your son getting his phone to do a manual network search and trying a different network to see if he gets the same results. If he does then there is a call bar set. This could be either on the handset or something that has been set by t mobile - as an additional note this bar could possibly have also been set up by your son on the t mobile network via his handset (If this is what happened then resetting it in Austria is unlikely to resolve the problem). I am not familiar with the handset in question so you would need to look the manual up to find out about setting call bars on the handset. If there appears to be no bars set on the handset then your son will need to contact t mobile.

[Tony_S]

Thank you both, the problem does seem identical to that experienced by Rick (Gwiwer).

A trip to the Tesco store where T mobile was recommended will be in order on return to UK. Son is off to Vietnam in the near future, perhaps taking the T mobile isn't a good idea!

Cheers

Tony

[Tony_S]

We are now back in the UK and went to the Tesco phone shop where my son purchased the phone and made the contract with T-mobile. The nice lady in Tesco understood the problem immediately. As well as asking for roaming to be authorised, T mobile also require you to ask for the "international call bar" to be removed. I think one is supposed to have psychic powers to know this, we were unable to find any information about this in advance.

I've suggested to my son that when the T mobile contract ends he gets an O2 phone where if you want to use it abroad they allow you to make calls!

[Gwiwer]

It required prior knowledge or an inspired guess to perform.

 

one is supposed to have psychic powers to know

 

This does sound remarkably similar and from two unconnected stores. Once is perhaps mischance, twice may be something more than coincidence?

[jamie92208]

I recently had the same problem with Virgin Mobile, and spent 3 weeks in various parts of Europe unable to take or recieve calls. They had assured me before I left that roamng was set up but it apparently wans't. After complining they are now paying my bill for the next 3 months.

 

Jamie