Hello, Sorry this is going to be lengthy.. I recently moved onto vodafone from talkmobile, at the same time upgraded my phone to a Motorola G5. When I send messages (standard messaging app) containing photos, they send fine, and when someone sends me one it works fine.. I can see the photo in the message app. So like every other phone works.
However a few weeks later, I arranged for someone else in the family to move onto Vodafone (from talkmobile), a similar contract (pay monthly) but with a Vodafone “smart N8” phone. Everything works okay except you can’t send a text message with a picture in it (MMS), you get an error message like “service not activated on network”. And when receiving a message with a picture in, rather than showing the picture you get a link to a website with a (difficult to remember) password.
Of course these days you can send/receive pictures in different ways (whatsapp for example) but the user of the phone isn’t technically good and if she receives a message with a url and a password won’t be able to view the photo.
I’ve spent hours trying to get this fixed, without success. Initially thought there may be a “bar” on the account for picture messages, but there wasn’t.
So I contacted Vodafone, fully expecting it would take a couple of minutes for them to sort it. But I’ve been on web chats and spoken on the phone for hours with various advisors, who have texted me new settings for the phone, then entered them manually. They have (supposedly) checked the account settings to make sure MMS is enabled. I have been told all sorts of different reasons why it won’t work, one of them said because it costs money to send mms messages, to which I replied why can’t it receive them as normal then?..
In the end they gave up and asked me to take it to a Vodafone shop. The first shop I took it to installed a different messaging app (Vodafone version of the normal message app) which appeared to work when he showed it to me in the shop but when I got home I realised it wasn’t sending mms, it was sending it as data in a similar way to whatsapp, and it only works if the other person sending/receiving pictures has the same app. So when someone sends a photo using the normal mms method, a website link with a password is still shown.
So I called Vodafone again and after another very lengthy phone session they said to take it to another Vodafone shop. Who told me there was nothing they could do as it is a problem with the account settings and the shop doesn’t have the authority to change that. They said I needed to call Vodafone again and ask for the “retention department”. Which I did, resulting in another very lengthy conversation, and they told me they had done all they could and I needed to take it to a vodafone shop again as they had left instructions on the account to tell the shop technician how to fix it (I was assured it would “definitely” work).
It didn’t work. The guy in the shop raised a “high priority” issue with the technical department, and it would “definitely" be fixed by 9am the next day, but if not to call the technical department. Guess what .. by 9pm the next day it still wasn’t working, and no one had contacted me. So I sent a complaint.
It seems like no one is able to enable MMS on this phone/service, which seems crazy. One of the guys I spoke to said it was very complex to enable mms and it could be a “one in a million” error. Surely it can’t be that difficult? It's not like MMS is new technology. In the last conversation (after I’d raised a complaint) I was told that MMS wouldn’t work if the phone was connected to WiFi. Surely not the case.. my own phone works fine to send mms messages when wifi is enabled, and I’ve tried turning off wifi and mms still didn’t work. I told the advisor this and he just kept repeating that the technical department had said you can’t send MMS through wifi. And then credited £10 to the account and asked if that would make us happy.. to which I replied no, we want MMS to work!..
If anyone can tell me how to fix this that would be much appreciated, or should I give up on it?! .. thinking of cancelling this contract if possible and going to a different provider.. though it may seem a minor issue I don’t see why we should have to pay for a service that doesn’t work properly.
Thankyou.
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