T-Mobile in Spain

[zdcatc12]

I have T-mobile that has free international data. My phone worked fine in Germany and Italy, but for some reason in both Barcelona and Palma it would not work. Any other T-mobile users had this issue?

[NCLiz99]

We were in Spain early 2020 and our TMobile unlimited data/text worked fine. 

[Hlitner]

We have used ours (pre covid) in Spain with no problem.  My question for the OP would be when this happened did you try turning off your phone (essentially rebooting).  We have had a few problems in other countries where, for some reason, my phone would not properly connect to the local cell provider.  A shut down and restart quickly resolved the problem.

 

Hank

[zdcatc12]

4 hours ago, Hlitner said:

We have used ours (pre covid) in Spain with no problem.  My question for the OP would be when this happened did you try turning off your phone (essentially rebooting).  We have had a few problems in other countries where, for some reason, my phone would not properly connect to the local cell provider.  A shut down and restart quickly resolved the problem.

 

Hank

Yes. I tried that both times to no avail. I went to a McDonalds in Barcelona waiting for the shuttle and used the wi-fi to chat with a T-Mobile agent. He could not figure out why it wasn't working in the 20 minutes that I had to chat with him. The error was something like "Roaming not available with this sim card" or something along those lines. It is just weird because it worked fine outside of Spain. BTW, I did have bars displayed, so I assume that I could have used the phone, but data was not available.

[VMax1700]

Perhaps your phone was connecting to a network that did not have a roaming agreement with T-Mobile.  Did you try to manually select the network or just let the phone select the network?

[zdcatc12]

7 hours ago, VMax1700 said:

Perhaps your phone was connecting to a network that did not have a roaming agreement with T-Mobile.  Did you try to manually select the network or just let the phone select the network?

Yes, on my chat with the T-Mobile guy, he had me manually select each network and they all gave the same message. There were either 4 or 5 showing up and none connected.

[Host Bonjour]

On 9/19/2021 at 9:20 AM, zdcatc12 said:

I have T-mobile that has free international data. My phone worked fine in Germany and Italy, but for some reason in both Barcelona and Palma it would not work. Any other T-mobile users had this issue?

 

Airline pilot friend for major US carrier had T-Mobile specifically because he flew internationally and Barcelona was one of his favorite destinations. Phone worked well there and, I think, better internationally than domestically (at first) though I believe they've worked out a lot of their old service issues now. 

 

May sound utterly simple, but sometimes simply shutting down and restarting my phone (iPhone/Verizon) solves a myriad of problems. I don't know why, but it does. If you're android, I'm less adept at trouble shooting, so apologies.

 

But I think your T-Mobile will serve you well in Spain. (Worked great in Madrid too!)

[bgrinstein]

I have been in Spain for 5 weeks. At first it did not work. I had to contact T-mobile and we tried a few things over several days until it worked (I think resetting network services on the iPhone did the trick). But that is not the end of the story:

 

 I am on magenta max with a new iphone 12 mini. My wife also has the iphone 12 mini, on the same plan and the same issue: Roaming on vodaphoneES,  with full (four) bars connection I get a max download speed of 0.17mbps and 0.21 mpbs for upload (on speed test). Consistently. It is difficult even to read menus at restaurants seems they all have gone the way of QR code at the table. It is infurating.

I have had several tickets opened and none resolved. It would be good to see I am not the only one: are there other users out tehre experiencing the same? The latest ticket was opened last Saturday Oct 16, 2021: “Thank you for being a valued T-Mobile customer! Trouble Ticket # 37677334 has been opened on your account. Please allow 3 business days for teams to review. Resolution can take longer depending on the issue.”  Opening the ticket was the result of a direct conversation with technicians (the umpteenth one) that  closed the previous ticket because they determined the problem was with vodaphone. Since I know people here I checked with my friends who have local vodaphone accounts and found out they have absolutely no problem -- it si not an intrinsic vodaphone network problem. So the current ticket is for t-Mobile tech’s to contact vodaphone and try to figure it out.

Please, other users with this problem, open more tickets! Complain loudly everywhere you can, maybe t-Mobile will notice

[VMax1700]

That sounds like T-Mobile  'throttling' the speeds so that they  (T-Mobile) do not get large roaming bills from Vodafone Spain for the data that you use.