I live in a moderate size city with overlapping coverage from many cellular providers. I’m not sure what the problem is today, but Verizon service has been down for about 6 hours across the city. All the phones of Verizon users are in SOS mode.
Why are we all not “roaming”? I guess I’ve always thought you enter roaming when you can’t reach a tower from your own provider, but I am in range of several other providers. My 12yo’s emergency cheap phone on Tello/T-mobile is connecting just fine. Is roaming geographically locked instead of accessibility locked? (ie T-mobile knows a Verizon cellphone at my address should be able to hit a Verizon tower so they don’t care/can’t see that I cannot currently make calls).
In: Technology
Domestic roaming is usually only limited to large parts of the country, for example Alaska, where your carrier doesn’t have service at all (instead, only GCI and AT&T have extensive coverage there).
Otherwise it’s generally disallowed, as it wouldn’t make sense for your carrier to be paying other carriers to use towers in the area your carrier already serves.
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