<p>skyhook - Have your phone on Airplane mode the whoe time. Your iPhone then becomes iTouch. It would prevent your phone from receiving any phone calls (rolling it into your voice mail). You would pay even if you don’t pick up. When you are in a wifi zone, just turn your wifi on (or just leave it on the whole time) because it will just keep on searching for any available wifi. You will be able to use your iPhone like a computer - send/receive emails, skype…</p>
<p>seiclan - I have a blackberry too. It has wifi capability. When I am home, I use my home’s wifi to receive data because its faster. As a matter of fact, we issue BB with wifi capability to employees that live in areas with bad cell signals. Ask your daughter(while she is still in the US) to turn off her network connection, then connect to a wifi to see if she could still receive emails. As far as min of 3 months, I am not sure if it’s correct. My husband goes overseas a lot. I always sign up for a data service a few days before he leaves, then I call them up a week after he returns to discontinue the service, there is no penalty and the cost is always prorated. I would try to speak to another agent (you get a different answer from differen people).</p>
<p>My daughter was in Italy over spring break with an IPhone. I did everything right on the front end - called AT&T 3 weeks before she left and got everythinhg worked out. About 3 days before she left called back and put everything in place - set her up with the $5.99 plan for international minutes at a reduced rate ($.99/minute - real reduced) and a data plan for about $99.00 for 100mb (i think) of data. I expected her bill to be about $300.00 or so. It came in at almost $700.00 and I was in shock. Started looking at the bill and knew that $100 would come off the top for the data plan for the next month - I needed to remove it. Still couldn’t understand why she had over $250 of data charges. Well, after about an hour on the phone with AT&T they figured out that the data plan was pro-rated for the first month - and she was only credited with about 20mb on her plan. I understood what they were saying, but I wasn’t informed of that and I thought I did everything right - asked them to check the notes on the account. The rep was very nice and had the ability to credit up to $250 so he took care of the extra data charges. Just realize that the purchase is a monthly charge - not a one time purchase and the data volume purchased will be pro-rated according to when you start the service.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to malign the ATT&T staff, but my experience is that you absolutely CANNOT rely on them to give you the full information you need, or even to get consistent answers from one person to the next. The internet published information is a little better, but it is still very unnecessarily confusing, and not formatted in a helpful way. This should NOT have to be so difficult and frustrating.</p>
<p><strong>End of rant</strong>* :-)</p>