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Just in time for SXSW, The wise and awesome Jay Goldman has just posted an excellent survival guide for anyone on Rogers who is traveling in the US and even thinking of turning their phone on.

The first thing you need to understand: if you don’t make some changes to your existing plan and you just go about using your phone like you do every day, you’re going to come home to a very nasty surprise in the form of a Rogers bill that will have you immediately applying for a government bailout package. I hear those are actually becoming hard to get, so you might want to keep reading.

Jay points out, Rogers charges standard voice rates of $1.70 a minute, texts at $0.60 each (actually we’ve seen Rogers charge $0.95 texts in the US) and data rates at the astounding $0.03/KB (that means $30/MB, or approximately $150 to transfer one single average MP3 or youtube video). And then there is Roger’s delightful practice of charging you roaming AND long distance on incoming calls while in the U.S.

But there is some hope! Jay recommends a bunch of good ways NOT to use your phone in chargeable ways as well as a few darkly secret Rogers plans that can help bring down the charges.

But the real win (you have an unlocked phone right?) is to leave your Rogers SIM card behind when traveling. Citizen Ziggy recommends:

If you are going to U.S. for SXSW or any other reason and want to use data on iphone at good price.

Once you get over border, get a T-Mobile PREPAID SIM.
Call support number and tell them you want to activate the “sidekick data plan” (1$/day unlimited data). DO NOT TELL THEM YOU HAVE iPhone. (tell them sidekick or HTC smartphone if they persist).

as for phone calls remember that the SIM also has free incoming calls. you can fwd your skype # or cellphone to the new number (charges may apply) or use http://jajah.com that turns outgoing calls into incoming calls for about 2cents/min.

If you are one of the lucky ones who have a http://grandcentral.com account you can use Grand dialer on your iphone to do the same thing that jajah does but for free.

LINK: Traveling to the US with Rogers