Cricket Adds Mexico Roaming, Canada to Come

Since AT&T’s purchase of Iusacel earlier this year, the wireless giant has been promising its customers that it will soon be bringing North American roaming deals to its customers. And, finally, it looks like the company is making good on its promise via its prepaid brand Cricket Wireless Starting yesterday, August 2, Cricket Wireless customers on AT&T’s $50 and $60 plans now include roaming while inside of Mexico at absolutely no additional cost. The roaming does not include data but does allow for unlimited talk and regular SMS text while inside of Mexico. Cricket announced that it intends to offer the same basic deal in Canada “soon” and I presume that the same restrictions and rules will apply. Speaking of which, there is one small catch with the new roaming agreement. While customers visiting Mexico (and eventually Canada) can use their devices basically as normal (sans data), if more than half of the total minutes and texts are sent while abroad, Cricket states that it might terminate your service. Here’s the official legalease on that:

Calls/texts from Mexico cannot exceed 50% of usage or service may be terminated.  No. of texts or no. of voice minutes from Mexico cannot exceed 50% of total no. of texts of voice minutes in a month for any consecutive 3 month. 

Both $50 and $60 plans already include unlimited talk, text and MMS nationwide as well as to both Canada and Mexico plus unlimited international texts to 38 other countries. The $50 plan includes 5 GB of data and the $60 plan includes 10 GB of data, none of which can be used abroad at the moment. This is undoubtedly the result of AT&T trying to keep up with T-Mobile which recently released its Mobile Without Borders initiative that allows customers on all Simple Choice plans (both pre and postpaid) to roam inside of Canada and Mexico at no additional cost. It’s nice to see companies working towards a continent-wide network, but I imagine the red tape on these offerings is pretty hefty at the moment. We’ll have to see how it changes, but at the moment it sounds like a good choice if you’re looking to vacation or travel for a short period.]]>