SaskTel can’t prevent roaming by U.S. border

SaskTel’s president says there’s no way the provider can stop U.S. cell towers from interfering with signals near the border, but customers can be vigilant to guard against charges.

SaskTel President and CEO Ron Styles is responding to a customers who are getting hit with data roaming charges while staying in Saskatchewan. Styles says signal interference is an issue for wireless customers across Canada along the U.S. border, and for U.S. wireless customers who pick up our signals. The only way to prevent roaming charges is to manually switch your device from the automatic roaming setting to the SaskTel only network.

“That would ensure that you wouldn’t connect to the United States or to a carrier in the U.S. so there are ways to manage it or to mitigate it and our intention is to try to educate our customers and ensure they’re able to do that,” Styles explained.

The original settings are put in place by manufacturers.

SaskTel will warn you with an instant message the first time your device flips over to an international tower, but Styles says it will only do so once every 15 days.

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“If you’re switching back and forth within 15 days, you’ll still only get one SMS message,” he said, noting that sending those messages every single time would be overkill. “It starts to become like spam for our customers and our choice and most other carriers have decided to only do it once and let the person know about it once.”

A small icon on the phone’s screen will also tell you when you pick up a U.S. tower, and there are also apps to track your roaming and data usage.

Turning off international roaming doesn’t solve the problem for some customers close to the border. They say the U.S. towers often block SaskTel signals entirely leaving them with the option of paying for roaming or getting no service. People in the area around Glen Ewen, Oxbow and Carievale have started a petition asking SaskTel to boost cell service in the area.

Styles says there is no easy solution because boosting signals on certain cell towers can actually interrupt SaskTel’s own network for people trying to get coverage on a different tower.

Signal strength also fluctuates depending on how many people are using the network at any given time. For example, if there are many users accessing the network on one tower, the coverage area drops from a radius of 15 kilometres down to 10 or seven. It also works in reverse when a U.S. tower has lower customer activity.

“The signal may expand and that may push it across the border for a period of time and potentially may crowd out ours when ours is more active and is slightly reduced,” he said.

Styles admitted there are certain areas near the border where SaskTel doesn’t provide very good coverage because it doesn’t make good business sense based on the relative population. He says SaskTel works with U.S. carriers to prevent signal overlap, but they still have to pay when customers pick up those towers on the other side of the border.

news@panow.com

On Twitter: @princealbertnow