North America Plan and Tri-mode phone

My husband, a trucker, travels from Flat Rock, MI to St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada 2 or 3 times a day. For each load he has to make a phone call from Canada to the USA, sometimes being put on hold for 10 to 15 minutes. With our old plan with another company, they had no breaks for this type of call, just a flat 69 cents a minute! Our last bill was $659 for one month of service. We decided to try Verizon's North America Plan. It would be great, but so far, the phone they sold us does not work in Canada. Our sales rep wants to exchange it for a tri-mode phone. Does anyone know if this might fix the problems, has anyone else had a problem with this?

Thanks for reading, and thank you for any response.

Mona

.....a tri-mode phone will only work if the signal in that area is an old Verizon analog tower... What company was your previous carrier?

Tmobile, and we are still with them as well. Ironically, that phone service works fine from Canada to USA, but cost 69 cents a minute, and they have no deals for those types of calls.

My husband spoke with someone else at Verizon, and this person still thinks it is something in the settings in the phone. So, we are still up in the air. We do have 15 days to return the phone and get out of the contract, so are hoping to get this resolved soon.

Mona

That's very odd - I'm on Verizon currently (as well as trying out Cingular at the same time - thinking of switching but haven't yet, but that' a whole other story).

Anyways, I go to Canada every so often to visit relatives, and some of them are in London Ont, very near St Thomas (about 15-20min away). My Verizon phone has ZERO problems - it's a Motorola E815 - which verizon no longer sells, but you could probably get through Ebay. I get service in digital (EV-DO even), no need for analog (not even sure if that phone is capable of it). I'm on the North America plan and have never ever had issues making calls from within Canada, from Canada to U.S., U.S. to Canada. Receiving calls no issues either. Even txt messaging works fine.

Either your phone is set to "home network only" - which might be the case here, or you have other issues. In Ontario, most likely getting service through Bell Mobility (CDMA, just like Verizon), which is a major network in Canada, and shouldn't be any problems getting signal from them.


Good luck!

Thanks Northerner for you response. Actually one of the senior techs called my husband, and said he thought it was a settings problem. He (the tech) did something and the phones seems to be working as of now. One other question for you, do they usually bill okay, i.e. no roaming charges, for the calls you make from Canada to the USA? That was our main reason for changing carriers, so is a big concern with us.

There are certain areas where still might incur roaming charges, due to being a small proprietary network or something like that where Verizon doesn't have a roaming agreement. But anywhere in between Windsor and St-Thomas, you won't have any issues. No roaming. The minutes just taken off your plan as any other call in your home network.


cheers

CDMA/GSM was just what I was going to question ... we ONLY get a CDMA signal (Verizon, amp'd) in the rural area where I live... Tmobile is a GSM carrier. i thought it may be the reason the phone wasn't workng where he was...

BUT!

I'm glad the news is good thus far !

Thank you both for your input.

Mona

That's strange Jeanie. So you can't call your friends in the area that use cingular? hah