What happens to my answerphone when I'm roaming?

Where is the answerphone?

Wherever you take your mobile phone, your answerphone stays at home. This means that calling to listen to messages is an international call, at the international roaming rates for calling your home network.

If you unconditionally divert all incoming calls to your answerphone, they're not forwarded to your mobile, and you don't pay for an international divert.

How do conditional diverts work?

If you have a conditional divert to answerphone set, the call goes to the network you are roaming on, then is passed back to the home network if you are not available.

This double-divert usually strips the information needed to identify which answerphone to put the message in, and so on some networks callers are asked to enter the mailbox number instead of hearing your greeting. At this point, many simply hang up!

Other mobile networks give each mobile its own individual answerphone number, so that the calls are diverted to a number that identifies which mailbox it is destined for. This is a preferable arrangement, but some networks seem to consider it a waste of precious phone numbers.

How can it be expensive?

The expensive scenario is when you have a conditional divert set. Assume that you set "divert on no reply":

An incoming call is sent on the international divert (at your expense).

You don't answer, so the call is diverted back home (at your expense) to your answerphone.

You later ring to hear the message left for you.

This means that you have paid for three international calls (or four if you then ring the caller back)!

The same is true for diverts for busy or not reachable.

Three alternatives

If you use the answerphone when roaming, make the diverts unconditional! For details of how to do this, see the GSM Codes page.

Another alternative is to use a messaging service. Some networks allow you to divert incoming calls to an operator who takes the caller's message and sends it to you as a text message. Orange call this Orange Messenger, and charge 25p per message sent: far cheaper than some international diverts, but you'll probably have to phone the caller back.

You can choose to simply refuse all incoming calls when you are roaming. See the Barring page for more details.

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