Verizon iPhone 6 Plus roaming in Europe

by philg

I used Verizon’s $10/day “travel pass” program to roam in Europe with my iPhone 6 Plus. In France this was frustrating due to the fact that the phone was never able to obtain LTE service; the phone reported “3G” connectivity most of the time. Our hotel offered 5 Mbits of download and about 200 Kbits/second of upload speed on its WiFi network so the entire week was pretty challenging for this Internet addict. Is it that Verizon doesn’t have a deal with the French telecoms for LTE? Or that a Verizon iPhone 6 Plus doesn’t have the right radio frequency capabilities? (this article suggests that there are different version of this phone with different radios)

I kept the phone in Airplane Mode in Russia because the travel pass arrangement does not work there. The Qataris on our tour were the only ones who seemed willing to ignore the crazy roaming charges and were happily using their smartphones as though they were at home.

The phone obtained LTE service in about half of the countries around the Baltic Sea but LTE coverage was never as good as here in the U.S. Again, I’m wondering if most of the LTE service offered to consumers in these countries is on a frequency that my U.S. iPhone cannot receive.

Separately, I learned from a Kuwaiti that mobile phone service there costs about $60 per month for 50 GB of data at “very fast” LTE speeds. There are three comprehensive networks and some resellers of bandwidth on those networks.

9 thoughts on “Verizon iPhone 6 Plus roaming in Europe”

  1. They unified the skus around the iPhone 6. I have a 6s purchased in the USA on verizon that gets perfect lte here in London where I live and in France etc. It’s a function of the Sim and how the other carriers allow the roaming. Clearly many do not permit non home Sims to access the lte. The handset definitely supports the same bands as local handsets.

  4. Mobile phone and internet is super cheap in France, in part due to a company called Free mobile. I pay 20 euros per month for 50 Gb of 4G data and unlimited calls and texts within France. The service is great in Paris, but it’s average outside urban areas.

    There is no contract for the cell phone plan. So you could have gone to one of the (very few) Free mobile kiosks in a “magasin de presse”, and obtained a sim card within few minutes with only your credit card. The credit card does not need to be French. You have to put your address, but you could use your hotel’s address for that.

  5. Phil – the issue might be CDMA frequencies that VZ and your thus the model of your phone depend on. Most other countries main carriers use GSM, and that’s where a SIM swap can be useful. Consider getting a GSM phone for travel or switch to T-Mobile, AT&T… Kuwait is pretty small so it must not be that expensive to build it out with latest cell towers – must be nice.

  6. My guess is it’s a roaming agreement between Verizon and French carriers. Using my Verizon iPhone 5s (which has a subset of the frequencies of the 6/6S) and a French carrier SIM I was consistently seeing LTE and >10mb/s download speeds in Paris

  7. Jan: The back of my iPhone 6 Plus says A1522. On the list that you sent there is no support for any French LTE network. It seems that one can also get an “iPhone 6 Plus” that has a different model number: A1524. That one handles a bunch more frequencies.

  8. @ parisien #4

    could you name the exact whereabouts of one of these, as you say, rare http://mobile.free.fr/ kiosks in Paris, so I could look it up. 50Gb a month for €20 sounds very inviting indeed, I presume it is more than enough for (average/ projected) 5hr nightly web browsing etc (no P2P serving of Linux distros from a tablet!)

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Mobile#Offers

    They also have an app, presumably useful over hotel WiFi before one finds that kiosk ;-))

    https://itunes.apple.com/app/assistance-free-face-to-free/id949476957?mt=8

  9. I switched to T-Mobile a couple of years ago, just so I can use my phone number while traveling. This year they give unlimited Internet and SMS’s in Europe. I used it in Germany, Spain, and Serbia. Calls to US phones are 20 cents/min.
    Download speeds were good enough to watch YouTube, consistently better than the WiFi speeds in my hotel.

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