International Roaming Facility.

International roaming means whenever you are visiting another country with your mobile phone, you can receive incoming calls and you can dial any desired number just as calling from your home country, if the mobile phone has the roaming facility enabled by your service provider. The so called roaming facility may bring you unexpected heavy phone bills too as it is an expensive service that you can get from your carrier.

International Roaming facility is available for Sri Lanka mobile phone account holders if they are taking their mobile phones with them abroad. This facility will allow them to receive calls to their mobile phone numbers and also allow them to make calls to the phones of their relatives, friends and businesses from their own mobile phone very easily. But the charges may be little high as the service is coming through your service provider's partner. You are paying to your local mobile phone service provider and his foreign partner too.

The international roaming allows you to send and receive SMS text messages and MMS, which are also little higher priced then your local rates.

The following mobile phone companies in Sri Lanka offer this International roaming facility to their customers.
Airtel
Mobitel
Hutch
Dialog
Etisalat
If you have planned to travel to a foreign country, contact your mobile phone service provider's nearest office and ask them about their roaming tariff (call charges). Roaming from some countries may be giving you heavy phone bill. Not only for the calls that you make but also for those incoming calls too you will be charged.

If you are having a Smartphone with 3G service option be careful if you are roaming with it, as your Smartphone may try to check for your emails for every 15 minutes connecting to the internet and because of this you may run in to heavy mobile phone bill, when you reach home. The bill may be mostly for the internet connectivity charges through the roaming partner.

Also some packages need to be activated by the service provider for international roaming.

HOW TO SAVE ROAMING PHONE BILLS?
If you are not waiting for calls from your home country, then better buy a starter SIM package from the country you are visiting. Don't sign for carrier contracts instead of SIM cards with reload facility. It will save you from unwanted heavy phone bills. The reloadable phone SIM will allow you to pay as you call and it will not a big burden for you.

Always use handsfree or speaker phone facility so you can view the call duration easily.

If you are getting voice distrubtion don't wait for it to be cleared one. Stop it quickly as it is an expensive call and the cause may be hot sun on your side or on the other party's country.

If you are going to use the roaming facility on your next trip, tell all your friends and relatives about the cost of the calls.
Having a dual SIM standby mobile phone with a post paid local country SIM will help you to reduce the roaming charges by selecting between SIM's to make the cheap calls.