Watch out for skyrocketing cellphone charges

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Traveling to Vancouver and planning to nurture your obsessive-compulsive habit of checking e-mail? Prepare for costly cellphone data charges.

If you have an iPhone or BlackBerry, you’re probably used to checking e-mail every half-hour or so, and pulling up a Web page or YouTube video at a whim. Might want to think twice if you’re in Canada this week.

You may have heard the stories about iPhone users getting socked with $3,000 cellphone bills after spending some time overseas. Even though you don’t have to cross any oceans to get to Vancouver, your carrier still counts it as roaming unless you already have an international plan.

If you’re a subscriber to AT&T -- the biggest smartphone telecom in the U.S. and the exclusive carrier of the iPhone -- the cost of surfing the Web is measured in downloads. In Canada, a megabyte of data costs $2.

In other words, download a song from iTunes, and you’ll probably end up paying AT&T $14 for the data usage -- on top of the 99 cents you gave Apple.

Watching something on YouTube can also eat up quite a bit of data. A high-quality music video can weigh in at more than 20 megabytes. Just loading the latimes.com home page gobbles about 2.6 megabytes.

AT&T offers a package called the Data Global Add-on. For $24.99, smartphone owners get 20 megabytes of data -- that’s $1.25 per megabyte instead of $2. Still pricey, but it should cover e-mail checking (just don’t download any attachments).

If you want to dodge the Internet fees altogether, you can either turn on ‘airplane mode’ (most phones have the setting) or disable data roaming. In the iPhone’s settings menu, navigate to the ‘general’ page and into ‘network.’ Ensure that data roaming is turned off.

While it’s easy to forget to turn off e-mail, travelers who have spent any time abroad usually know to avoid cellphone calls at all costs.

Calling cards are usually a safe bet. AT&T has a Canada plan for $4.99 a month. It lowers the Canadian calling rate to 59 cents per minute, and you don’t have to sign a contract.

But those minutes can add up quickly, so you’ll want to keep your conversations short. We’re talking, ‘Vancouver great! Slalom, my favorite. Talk soon. Bye!’

-- Mark Milian