Vodafone UK Extends Free Mobile Roaming to 29 New Destinations
Customers of mobile operator Vodafone‘s pay monthly 4G ‘Red Entertainment‘ plans will soon be able to enjoy cost free global roaming in a total of 77 destinations when a further 29 countries are added to the list, including some big locations such as the USA, South Africa, Canada and most of of the Caribbean.
The Red Entertainment plans currently cost from £24 per month (SIM Only) for 20GB of data usage, unlimited mins/texts, Global Roaming, a 3-month free trial of Secure Net (i.e. mobile traffic filtering – £1 per month thereafter) and your choice of a NOW TV Entertainment Pass, Amazon Video, Spotify Premium or Sky Sports Mobile TV content access.
Previously the Global Roaming feature only gave subscribers access to free mobile roaming in 48 destinations and outside of those you had to pay £6 a day to use your UK allowances in the operator’s 104 ‘Roam-further‘ destinations. But a further 29 locations will be added to free roaming from 4th September 2018, when Vodafone adds the new Global Roaming Plus feature.
The 29 New Locations (Full List)
Albania, Anguilla, Antigua, Aruba, Australia, Barbados, Bermuda, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Canada, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Ghana, Grenada, Jamaica, Kenya, Lesotho, Mexico, Monsterrat, Mozambique, Netherland Antilles, New Zealand, South Africa, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent, St Lucia, Trinidad & Tobago, Turks and Caicos, UK Virgin Islands, USA.
Many of the new locations were previously included under the £6 a day ‘Roam-further‘ add-on, thus that add-on will now be reduced from 104 destinations to 75. On top of this the new Global Roaming Plus feature will also add 500 international minutes to EU destinations (i.e. the ability to call both landlines and mobiles abroad at no extra cost).
We should add that the operator supports 4G roaming in 137 destinations and so-called “full speed” roaming on 4G “where available on all plans with no data throttling“.
UPDATE 10:53am
Just to clarify, the enhancement is available now for pay monthly packages with phones but it will launch on SIM Only come 4th September.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Only if you buy entertainment plan with a phone not sim only
There are Entertainment SIM-only plans, and the new roaming plan does apply to those plans.
Do you know if this will this be available for business customers as well ?
Nothing for business customers, plus it’s for new contracts only.
I returned to Manchester from New York a few hours ago and used Vodafone Global Roaming Plus whilst there. I upgraded to a Red Entertainment Plan about a week before travelling.
My plan served me well, switching between AT&T and TMobile depending on signal strength. I can confirm I received 4G speeds with no throttling because my phone supports the USA 4G bands.
I was also able to tether and provide access to 4G data to another UK phone which didn’t support USA 4G bands however, whilst the mobile hot-spot function was activated on my phone, I was unable to access data on my own phone so I think this is possibly a method to prevent more than one user accessing 4G data, from the same plan, simultaneously.
Nevertheless, Global Roaming Plus worked fantastically for us in all 5 Boroughs of New York City and it was a much better option than using a heavily throttled Three sim card with basic 3G speeds.