TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums US VI and Puerto Rico Cell Service sailing the USVI

We are coming up to our first trip to the USVI, and we are wondering about cell reception and internet coverage from the anchorages near St. Thomas & St. John?

Cel service is fine.
On the East end of St John’s Leinster Bay the BVI cel company will hijack your signal and charge you a few dollars per minute, either turn off roaming or get from your cel company a daily plan where they charge you a flat $10 per day fee while roaming

Pretty spotty coverage for me (T-Mobile) on east side of St John. My wife does better with AT&T, but like sail445 says, watch out for the hijacking.

I did hear that AT&T no longer services the USVI -- how does that work if that is who my carrier is? I am bit ignorant when it comes to this kind of thing - LOL - so is there a charge if my cell is picking up a different carrier?

I don't think that's true. Was just there start of November and had AT&T service as normal. I just looked up their coverage map and it indicates "off net coverage" which I believe simply means it's not guaranteed coverage, i.e., somewhat spotty and marginal speed.
Our experience has been that AT&T works fine on STT. On STJ it is a bit more spotty.

ATT in PR and the USVI was sold to Liberty a Central American company but the deal was they have to use the ATT network and honor all the contracts.
The service is identical to ATT.

I have ATT. pretty decent coverage. turn off data roaming and extra charges won't be an issue if your phone auto switches to another network. with ATT we sign up for $10/day to enable our plan to transfer if we would kick over to another network and we still use it. International roaming or something like that.

st thomas no issues.

st john can be spotty in maho area leinster etc. coming around east end you may switch to BVI network. times of day with use is high it slows significantly. maho can be so spotty that it works on one mooring and not on the next mooring over.

overall I have no complaints though. if i don't get internet, then i'm on vacation.

have fun.

AT&T works in most anchorages. Sprint and T-Mobile require line of sight to St. Thomas. T-Mobile can roam to BVI. Verizon apparently has a roaming partnership, but I have no first hand experience.

Spots on St. John where AT&T won't work are those out of line of site of the Bordeaux Mountain tower - outer Coral Harbour and Eastern Leinster Bay.

Cheers, RickG

My wife and I are on Verizon. $10 a day and had coverage on STT and STJ. Of course that was a year ago.

We get very good coverage with Verizon throughout the USVI. No $10 international roaming fee except when your phone sniffs the BVI cell towers from the northeast shore of St John. We try to remember to turn off mobile data when we're sailing between Whistling Cay and Ram Head.

The signal can be sketchy at times in Little Lameshur Bay on the south shore of STJ. Sailing between STJ and St Croix we get a usable signal for all but the middle 8~10 miles of the 32 nm passage.

I was just in St John all last week and Verizon is very limited. Others on my boat had Sprint with decent coverage. My Verizon kept picking up on BVI towers and I’m pretty sure I will see $10/day travel pass charges for a few of my days there. Mainly eastern end areas like Maho and Francis. Safest bet is to just turn the phone off if you’re able to and enjoy your trip!

"Safest bet is to just turn the phone off if you’re able to and enjoy your trip!"

Amen to that!!

I can also attest that AT&T worked great for our trip. We too do the $10 a day international access for if we are on the Coral Bay side of St. John and the service switches to Lime but we actually never had to use it this trip and our phone worked just like it does at home without any extra fees.