Sending SMS from landline not working

[Nigel977889]

I've also had this issue for months,

After working fine for a few years, the text (SMS) service on my BT landline has effectively stopped working. For the past few months, if someone sent me a text it would take roughly 24 hours to arrive. My BT Trio phones are text enabled and the accounts set up to receive SMS messages as text, but any messages are now automatically voiced and never delivered as text. Reporting a text fault to BT is impossible as the 151 operator has limited tagging options available. I’ve reported it three times and they’ve logged my text fault as “no dial tone” for example. This leads to confusion when the engineer turns up and discovers there's no fault on the line. It’s resulted in comments like “I don’t know why they’ve sent me’ a text fault is outside my area of expertise”. The engineers all seem to agree that the problem is probably at the exchange, but there’s seems no way of end users being offered an exchange level fault solution. BT offer a text via landline service, so it’s not unreasonable to expect it to work? Any ideas re what to do next in my attempt to get it fixed would be much appreciated.

[NeilO]

Hi @Nigel977889 welcome to the community and thanks for posting. I'm sorry to see you're texts are being converted to speech. Is the caller display still working on the line as that's needed to display the texts?

Thanks

Neil

[Nigel977889]

Hi Neil0

The BT Trio phone I use has a base unit and there are three handsets configured to work with it. About three weeks ago, when the text was briefly working (see explanation below) the incoming text alert showed on all three handsets. I think if the caller display wasn't working on one handset it would still show up on at least one of the other two.

Of the three Openreach engineers who've been tasked with investigating this fault, two of them did nothing and my fault report just timed out. However, the second one immediately admitted he wasn't aware a text service was available via land lines. He also said he had no idea how to address the problem, but he did know someone who would, and that was his boss. Within a couple of days I got an email to say the fault had been repaired and sure enough my text service was back to 100%. This was about a month ago, and the repair lasted roughly a week before reverting back to a 24 hour delay receiving text messages that were all voiced. Other posts connected with this same texting issue have said they get voiced messages from 00000 reporting there is a technical issue. I've never had one of these calls from 00000.

Thanks for getting back to me.

Nigel

[StuartH]

Hi @Nigel977889 

Thanks for your reply.

Do you have Call Protect enabled on your line if so please check that 0800587529 has not been blocked this is the number used to deliver the text messages as text rather than voice.

If this doesn't help please text from your landline 00000 this should test if the service is working correctly.

Thanks

Stuart

[Nigel977889]

Hi StuartH,

Call protect was enabled but the first time I reported the text fault to 151 they suggested that removing it might be the solution. Unfortunately removing it made absolutely no difference. The only features currently enabled on the landline are Privacy At Home and Caller Display.

Thanks

[Nigel977889]

Hi Stuart H,

I 've previously tried texting the various commands to 00000 but it's made no difference. In the past when it's been working, texting a test message to 00000 produced a confirmation message reply/response. Currently the phone confirms the test text has been sent but then nothing happens regarding a reply/response.

Thanks

[StuartH]

Hi @Nigel977889 

Thanks for replying just wanted to rule that one out.

I've sent you a private message asking for some more information so we can investigate this.

It might take a few days for us to get back to you however as we are a small team but we can look into what has happened previously and work to get this resolved for you.

Thanks

Stuart