I have been successfully roaming using my 2degrees SIM in Fiji and Samoa. Simply arrived in country and phone automatically attached to local network(s) with no trouble data roaming straight away. $8 debited from my account every day I roamed as expected. Easier and cheaper than faffing around with purchasing a SIM from the local operator.

Today I arrived in American Samoa. I knew ahead of time that two SIMs I had with me from 2degrees (On Account) and Vodafone (Prepay) have no roaming agreements in American Samoa so I was not surprised when 2degrees SIM refused to attach to local networks and Vodafone SIM attached fine but no data service. However I was informed from Spark's website/app that Spark claims to have roaming there and offers a $25 data pack which has American Samoa within its supported area.

So swapped out my SIMs for my Spark SIM and got the usual welcome message.

Had some trouble getting the SMS text service (i.e. texting 'BUY ROAMDATA' to 258) to work as it never would respond (other than to say 'We've received your request more than once so we will ingore this one' when I tried again). So tried the App instead and realised the reason the BUY ROAMDATA texts were not working was because I didn't have enough credit. Seems their SMS service assumes the user has enough credit and does not reply with an error message if not.

Worry not I thought, the app made it easy to top up $25 and purcahse the roaming pack in one go. Easily set up in app and verified through Spark App that 2GB of roaming data has been allocated against my account (and also received SMS confirmations etc). Checked destinations covered by the pack I had nad sure enough American Samoa is included.

Problem was I could never get data to work.

1. Phone attaches fine to the local network (Bluesky 544-110). Attaches to their UMTS network as expected as Spark website advises no 4G.

2. No data so checked data roaming settings. All correctly set for all data roaming to work (which is expected as same phone was fine with 2degrees data roaming working flawlessly on a number of networks in Fiji and Samoa).

3. Have had advice previously that manual network selection sometimes solves things. Tried this also to no avail.

4. Tried rebooting the phone and putting Spark SIM into a different slot to see if it made any difference. None.

5. Tried a second phone I had. In second phone, Spark SIM also attaches fine to Bluesky. Phone settings checked and also set up correctly for data roaming. Alas also no data roaming activated.

Ended up grabbing a local SIM from Bluesky which worked fine.

So back to the boat at the end of the day I thought I would phone the Spark Roaming Helpdesk to at least give them an opportunity to look into the issue. After a long fustrating journey through its IVR maze I ended up in a queue for a Spark representative with an estimated hold time of one hour. Presumely the IVR just dumped me into the general Spark queue and there is no such thing as a Roaming Helpdesk?

Happy to provide details privately if any Spark staffers here. Just DM me. Want to help out future customers.