Manual Network Selections and PDP Context Survival

An international roaming thought today: While in the past I used manual network selection while roaming mainly to reduce the number of unwanted welcome SMS messages I have recently found another good use for it: As I am usually always connected to the packet side of the network, using manual network selection and thus locking the mobile to a particular foreign network prevents the PDP context from dropping every time there's a coverage hole and the mobile phone searching and attaching to another network. Quite a nasty thing if you are billed extra for each context activation or in big increments. But I would certainly trade manual network selection for affordable data roaming prices...