Dropped SMS’ to Verizon?
Let me give you some background information–starting about 4 months ago (Feb 2008), I have been unable to text message anyone on the Verizon network from my Cingular (now AT&T) phone.I do in fact have the 200 message plan for my phone (a SMT5600 or HTC Typhoon depending on what carrier you use), and this began to annoy me. Here I was, paying for a service that I could not use.
I could send text messages from my Windows Mobile phone to AT&T customers, and it would also appear that my text messages to Verizon customers would send also, but the customer would never actually receive the message. The odd thing was that I could receive messages from other carriers too–I just couldn’t respond.
I checked the ‘net and found that there were some issues ‘replying’ to messages in Windows Mobile 2003, but even by typing in the number in a new message didn’t fix the problem.
Puzzled by this development, I decided to call AT&T customer support, and after an approximate wait time of 30-45 minutes (my fault, because I called at 7:00PM–the highest traffic time of the day for support call centers) I was greeted by someone who promptly asked me to reboot my phone. I complied and then was instructed to send a SMS to a Verizon customer. I did, and the message ‘went’ through on my phone, and the AT&T tech verified that it did indeed pass through their 3rd party SMS routing vendor (Verisign), but I never received a response from my friend on Verizon. The tech then decided to put in a support ticket and I was told it would be fixed in 3-5 days.
3-5 Days later, still no text messaging. Keep in mind that I have the 200 SMS-to-other-carriers-plan and I have been testing my phone daily. I’m paying for it to not work… still. I tried my SIM card in another phone, and still no joy.
4 Months later, I now realize that it’s time to call AT&T again. I call as soon as I get to school and am prompted that I am required to ‘verify’ the last four digits of the account-holder’s SSN. Great. I’m not the account-holder… I don’t know who is. The customer support rep said “For security, please verify the last four digits of the account-holder’s SSN”, and I said, “For security, I cannot give that information out at this time”, all I heard was a “CLICK!”. They hung up on me.
I called at lunchtime after getting the SSN from the proper person, and was immediately (nice, eh?) greeted with a tech (not a CSR) who promptly agreed that there was a problem– but she couldn’t see where. To her computer, it showed that the SMS got through AT&T fine and was handed off to Verizon fine also. She said to submit a support ticket, so we did.
I got a call later on that day stating something to the effect of “we really don’t believe there is an issue with our network, have your friend call Verizon– your support ticket has been canceled”. Hmm, that’s odd, I seem to remember that the law of probability states that since I cannot send messages to ANY Verizon customer, the probability of it being a problem with Verizon is very low.
I called when I got home and finally got someone to put in another support ticket with AT&T, and this time the ticket went through (yesterday).
This morning, I was perusing the intewebs and stumbled upon this– http://www.modmyifone.com/forums/t/13991-cant-send-unicode-sms-other-network.html after searching Google for “windows mobile unicode”.
What I found was someone with (almost) the same issue as me, except they were on an iPhone. SMS goes through fine, but the receiver never gets the message.
Now, to make a (really) long story short, I fixed it myself! The whole problem lied in my signature.
[»TylerFixer«]
used to be my signature on my phone, and apparently the » and « were being sent as unicode, which Verizon does not support.
Here’s my fix:
- Open ‘Messaging’ on your Windows Mobile phone
- Go to your ‘Text Messages’ folder
- Press ‘Menu->Options’ then to go ‘Sending’
- Uncheck ‘Use Unicode when necessary’
- Press ‘Done’
- Go to ‘Signatures’ and change your text message signature.
That seemed to fix it for me! Huzzah!
So, thus ends my saga of trying to fix my SMS problem to Verizon.
If this helps anyone, please let me know in the comments box below 
UPDATE: Almost right after I finished writing this, I received a call from a very polite AT&T CSR to inform me that they would be more than happy to give me a $5 refund for my trouble. Not a large amount of money, but I really do appreciate the gesture. She also stated that since I only had a few messages left outgoing, she could automatically use that $5 to go towards my 200 message counter. Huzzah!
Keywords: sms to verizon problem cingular at&t att text message to verizon unicode utf-8 utf-7
