Flashing while away from home? Bad idea?

[miles_prower]

I'm resurrecting this thread because it was the only one I found discussing the risks of flashing while away from your home network.

I was in Japan recently with my VZW TP2 running SSK 3.0 ROM. I'd taken the phone earlier to the UK and Germany on the same ROM; in those countries, I used my prepaid Virgin Mobile UK SIM for both voice and data service.

In Japan, prepaid SIM cards are difficult to obtain for non-residents (people without national health cards), and rental SIMs are costly. Therefore, I chose to stay with my Verizon/Vodafone SIM and rely on Verizon's unlimited international-roaming data plan at $2 a day with Skype Mobile for voice calls.

Unfortunately, with SSK 3.0 ROM, I was unable to connect to data once I landed in Japan, even after trying every network configuration/settings I could find here and at XDA, and verifying all settings with Verizon Global Support.

So... on the second day in Japan, after reading through this thread, I downloaded the official VZW 6.5 ROM and flashed my phone. For the remainder of my week-long stay in Japan, I had no problem getting service on SoftBank.

And then, when I landed back in the US, I found that I could only get data service, but no voice or SMS--even after dialing *22890 and *22891. So, I called up Verizon Global Support again, and the tech immediately understood the problem and walked me through the process of manually entering an authentication key. Once the key was added, all services were restored.