One hour free wifi on Gogo with T-mobile broken could be International Roaming block

OK, here is a weird one. One of the (many!) nice features of T-mobile is that in addition to their awesome Netflix On Us partnership (you get a $17 off the $24 Netflix premium plan) is their one hour of free WiFi and unlimited texting, iMessage, Whatsapp, etc on Gogo US flights which are on Alaska, American, and Delta.

So to figure this out, I tried the T-mobile Twitter support for the first time at @tmobilehelp, it actually works super well if it is a little confusing. What happens on a PC is that you send a DM and then it asks you to verify, this happened a few times with me, each with a different result, the first time, it asked my phone number on a new web page and then said all was good, but no one answered. Then I tried again and it asked for a new password for this connection (which is weird). Then on my phone, it actually went to the main T-mobile login site and said the same.

I’m not sure which one of these it was, but finally someone answered. And the weird thing is that he was great, but there was no good-bye and thanks you, but it worked!

Could it be International Roaming Blocking?

Well, they answered and said, well the only thing they could see is something really buried in the T-mobile site, but you go to your profile and there is a link called International so it is not in the Add-ons section and one thing it says is “Block International Roaming Charges”. I turned this on because it means that if T-mobile doesn’t have an agreement with them. Since they support 210 countries and even give you low bandwidth data for free with their T-Mobile One (it used to be called magenta), that’s going to be pretty unusual.

But, I guess that actually makes some sense, GoGo inflight is like an international carrier in that it will charge you for data and so forth so maybe it is included in the list.

I will only know the next time I fly 🙂