SMS Messages to Group get turned into MMS and you get charged for them

[Anonymous]

Just thought I'd throw this out there to see if anyone else was aware of it.

I recently obtained a new O2 account and texted about 20+ people my new number. I checked my account later in the day and saw that O2 had charged me £7 for it so I spoke to customer services.

this is what they told me. It turns out that if you send a message to a group of people then their phone numbers are included in the character count for SMS. The character count will inevitably be greater than 160 characters and at that point the O2 infrastructure turns your SMS into an MMS.

Now maybe I'm missing the point here, but if your tariff includes unlimited texts and you have an inordinate amount of data usage available to you then MMS traffic should be included in there somewhere and not as a seperate service. I got charged more to send a "Here's my number, call me maybe" to 26 people than a month's worth of unlimited broadband by my ISP !

not happy, although they did credit me the cost. I'll just be very wary about sending texts in future, even though my tariff is unlimited.

[MI5]

Yes its been discussed on here before. It is a feature of the phones software.

[Anonymous]

I had a bit of a think about it. I'm guessing the iPhone "sends as one" whereas other phones would split the message and send it out x times individually ?

[MI5]

On the latest iPhones and Android phones, yes, that is exactly what is happening. If you have an iPhone you can turn off the Subject field for text messages which will stop it from happening. If you have an android phone you can download message apps off Play (Handcent, GoSMS) which you can set in the options to stop it from happening.