Whenever a device disconnects from its carrier's cell tower and connects to another carrier's tower, the device is roaming. There are two types of roaming, international and domestic. In this article, we're going to be addressing domestic.

When domestic roaming is happening, the following conditions are being met:

Currently, not all plans on Gigs have domestic roaming enabled, due to domestic roaming being an extremely expensive feature that isn't natively included in carrier plans. This means that in order for this feature to be added, there would need to be an additional cost paid to the carrier on a per-plan basis.

Because of this, there are instances where users may run into an issue with using their service when they are outside of an area with good, regular network coverage. Typically, the issue is noticed when the user attempts to make a call while outside of their coverage area, and they hear a message telling them to add credits to their plan.

When attempting to make a phone call while outside of their coverage area, the user will hear a message asking them to "please add credits" to their plan. This is the main indicator that domestic roaming isn't currently on their plan, and they are not able to connect to other networks' cell towers.

There isn't a way to add credits to a subscription to fix this issue, and there isn't a way for us to edit the message that's being heard. This is a default message that's been set up by the carrier.

While domestic roaming is present and taken into consideration on all carrier networks, we've seen that a small subset of only T-Mobile users are running into the "please add credits" message. This means that our AT&T users are currently unaffected.

To get an idea of where a user with T-Mobile service may experience this issue, please refer to the T-Mobile coverage map below. You may also check an exact address here:

While adding domestic roaming to the plan would correct the problem, this feature is an expensive one. This would end up increasing the cost for both you and your users, which is something we're trying to prevent so that we can keep our services and products affordable and available.

Instead, the following solution should be looked into to see if it works for both you and your affected user. If possible for your user, you will want to consider moving them to an AT&T SIM. Please keep in mind that AT&T does require a device to be on their approved list before it can be used on their network.

To provide some additional context, the price of domestic roaming is heavily based on the usage of the user. This means that the more someone uses their device while domestic roaming, the more expensive the cost.

With smartwatches, these typically see a much lower usage than other devices (such as phones), which means the cost to add domestic roaming to these plans isn't going to be as high. Because of this, domestic roaming is automatically added to smartwatch plans, but will not be added to phones. Again, this is due to the cost of the feature.