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I was in the UK for a week and a half and had hoped to use my iPhone while I was there. It will work in Europe, but the consequences of doing so can be staggering! Fortunately I researched how much it might cost me to use the iPhone while there and was sufficiently taken aback that I never bothered to turn it on once. In fact I made sure it remained in Airplane mode the entire time with wi-fi turned off.

Why? Because AT&T charges an international roaming fee of $1.30 per MINUTE to use their network in the UK. You can buy an International plan for a mere $3.99/month, but that only succeeds in knocking the per minute rate down to 90 cents a minute.

Worse, the ATT&T rep I spoke to warned me that using Wi-Fi in the UK would cost me $5/5mb. My own sense was that the AT&T rep had it wrong, and my research agrees. I’d love to know if others have been charged this fee for using Wi-Fi via their iPhone overseas. It simply makes no sense to me that I would be charged since I would not be using cellular roaming.

The Apple site seemed to indicate that what AT&T told me was wrong. But I didn’t take the chance.

Not that it mattered anyway since in the UK, hotels want $30 (15 pounds) per day to use their Internet connection. To their credit, they did have a special going: you could buy 45 minutes of access for a mere $10 (5 pounds) and they would throw in an additional 45 minutes FREE. Wow! A whole 90 minutes for only 10 bucks!

Of course that was not quite as bad as filling up my daughter’s gas tank. She was driving a borrowed Renault station Wagon about the size of a Ford Focus, and it cost $230 (115 pounds) to fill the tank.

But there was a kicker on the Internet connection issue: the last night we were there, we wanted to confirm our flight and check our email and a couple of other essentials and decided to pay $10 (5 pounds) for an hour of service (different hotel). We spent an hour with the tech support folks trying to make it work. We managed to get online but every few minutes, the connection was lost and you had to go through the entire login process. It was completely unusable. At least we were not charged for our ordeal.

Makes me love those cheap American hotels with free Internet.