I am customer of Vodafone in Germany. When traveling outside of Europe, Vodafone offers so called Reisepakete (Travel-Packages), such as 10GB data volume for 30 days for that specific country. The contract with Vodafone is done by sending an SMS (short message) to specific service number.. The contract is activated when you enter that country.

This concept worked for me entering the that country. But when the data volume had been exceeded (10GB) I received the offer from Vodafone service number, to re-new this contact, as I did. So I sent the specific short message to the service number again, but now the data volume has not been activated, suddenly I have been offline. (Vodafone blocks roaming in case of no active Reisepaket).

I realized that the Vodafone system only works if that country is entered first time, but the system does not assume staying in that county longer and re-newing those travel packages (Reisepaket). Simply restarting the phone did not solve the issue.

The question is, how to simulate leaving a country and re-entering the country? This way the Vodafone systems might activate my ordered Reisepaket once more.

Finally, the solution was to enter the Settings menu of my Android phone, and changing the local network operator back and forth. To do so, enter the Settings menu of your phone view the “Internet” settings and open the set up of your mobile data provider, in my case Vodafone. There

1. Scroll down to “Automatically select network“, remember the selection, and disable this feature.
2. Manually select another local network operator, ensure you reach status “Connected”
3. Now, again, open the list of local operators and select the one from step 1.
4. Now, you should receive a short message (SMS) from Vodafone service, welcoming you to the country, and telling you that your Reisepaket has been activated, yeah!
5. Now, re-enable “Automatically select network“, and you are done.

Hope this helps.