Travel Technology - Text messages to/from the USA

I travel to the US on a regular basis from the UK. I have a Cellular One phone in the US through family. For some reason, I am able to send a text to phones in the UK, but unable to receive anything in return. This applies to several UK networks I have tried. Is this a problem with Cellular One, or networks in the UK?


Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

I would think that this is a Cellular One issue and contact their customer service. My situation was the reverse of yours: my family in the US on T-Mobile and me in the UK with an Orange PAYG, but there was never any issue with sending/receiving SMS in either direction.

This is not uncommon; many carriers cannot send SMS to T-Mobile USA customers either. Years ago I fought my way up the data support group's incompetence ladder at TMo and finally got an answer to the question "why?"

In order for a carrier to deliver a message from their network to another one, they have to know a number of things about the other number, including whether it's able to receive SMS messages or not (for example, in the US, landline phones can't receive SMS), the network it's on, etc. In other countries, mobile phones have a special area code or prefix (for example, all mobiles in Spain begin with 6xx).

Each carrier maintains a table of phone number prefixes on other networks where they have agreements to deliver messages. When someone goes to send a message, they look up the destination number in the table and if they find a rule for it, they send it along.

In the US, mobile numbers are all mixed in with everything else, and many carriers can't or won't build out that enormous table, and even fewer can keep it up to date. With the way number portability works in the US, it's possible to have a number in the table that is now on a different network than it was previously, so the carrier may route it correctly but it still doesn't get to the right network for delivery.

I don't know if it's equally difficult with all US carriers, but that's the explanation for the problem.

I receive sms messages on my US T-Mobile account from the USA, Vietnam and Thailand all the time. Haven't noticed any problems.

My cell provider is US T-Mobile.
I have had no problems receiving/sending texts to friends on UK Orange prepaid and 3 (Three) Prepaid

I use T-Mobile USA. I was traveling abroad in Asia earlier this month and sent out several SMS messages. None of them went through, but I was billed for them anyway. :rolleyes:

Using both UK and Norwegian based mobile phones in Europe, I have not been able to reliable send/receivemessages with relatives in the US on Verizon and ATT Mobile.

Was the same ages ago when I lived in the US and was using T-mobile - could not count on anything goign/coming from Europe.

I have a US tmob acc and send/recieve texts froam all over the world such as:

HKG
India
SIN
Mexico
brazil
argentina
columbia
europe

do not know why you are having so many problems..

I have t-mo USA and have sent/received messages from many countries. In the UK, I know I had a problem exchanging text messages with phones from one carrier (sorry don't remember which) but generally have not experienced any issues.

In order to send from overseas (or use your phone) you need to set up the plan with international access.

I have a US tmob acc and send/recieve texts froam all over the world such as:

HKG
India
SIN
Mexico
brazil
argentina
columbia
europe

do not know why you are having so many problems..


I just explained why, right up there about five posts ago.