Vodafone Romania, unable to send/receive SMS to numbers outside Romania

General Discussion
1

I have a Google Pixel 7, and a 4a, both with IodeOS. The Pixel 7 has a Vodafone Romania SIM. I also have two phones with USA SIM’s that I use over WiFi calling.

My goal is being able to send/receive SMS with a friend in Italy.

The behavior is - when sending SMS to a Romanian phone, like my wife’s Pixel 6a with Vodafone RO SIM, the message goes through fine - when sending to my friends Italian number, or either of my USA numbers, the message fails to send, the app says “Tap to retry”, and there is a momentary popup saying “Couldn’t send messages, carrier error”.

My wife’s phone, Pixel 6a running LineageOS, can send/receive text messages with my Romanian phone perfectly well.

My USA iPhone, and my USA Pixel 6a (IodeOS), both operating over WiFi calling in Romania, can send SMS messages to my Romanian phone, and can send/receive messages with my Wife’s LineageOS phone.

I’ve read [Workaround] Galaxy S10 - iodeOS 6.9 - unable to send SMS (receive working though) - #4 by velologiste where there is a similar problem.

His workaround was deinstalling Nachrichten but I have no idea what that is.

I looked at APN’s – you might remember me from an epic exploration of APNs last year – and they are the same on both mine and my wife’s phone.

I found my way into that secret Phone Information menu. It shows “IMSI” and that both data and voice mode is LTE. At the bottom, an SMSC number shows up when tapping the Refresh button. The Phone Information menu does not show IMS information, just the IMSI.

The SMSC which shows up, +40722006000, is what Perplexity tells me the Vodafone RO number for prepaid subscribers – which I am. There is a different number for regular subscribers. But, the terms on the Vodafone RO website say a prepaid user like myself should be able to make International SMS messages.

I am using the +1 or +39 country code prefixes.

I did try 3 other SMS applications, with the same behavior.

”Vodafone RO” and “LTE” are both what show up in the SIM page in the settings

Nik had suggested something about RCS messages, but I was unable to find that menu he showed.

I tried resetting network settings then rebooting, no change

2

I just tried switching this SIM over to my iPhone 6s. Sending a message to my USA phone number results in “Message Send Failure” and “Not Sent”

Ergo, it might be related to my service level with Vodafone. That shouldn’t be the case, however.

3

UK carriers (of which Vodafone is one) very often block international calls/sms unless the bill payer/contract holder explicitly requests international calling to be enabled. Vodafone RO could be doing the same thing, its to protect the customer from inadvertently racking up huge bills

4

That’s possible. On Monday I’ll head over to the Vodafone store when they’re open.

However, this may have been too buried in all the text I wrote.

My wife has an identical SIM card from Vodafone, also on a pay-as-you-go plan, and in her phone (Pixel 6a on LineageOS) the SMS feature works fine. If Vodafone were blocking international on my card, wouldn’t they block international on her card?

Well, maybe not, I did pay extra for awhile on her card for international roaming on her card while we were in the USA. Maybe that flipped a setting.

HOWEVER, these are the settings on my account, which shows the ability to do SMS to international numbers:

1.000 minute internationale mobil/min nationale1000 / 1000min
2.000 Min/SMS-uri nationale2000 / 2000min/sms
internet national, minute si SMS-uri in VodafoneNelimitat

5

I see you used your SIM in an iPhone. Likely it registered your number with iMessage and this can cause all sorts of complication when then using on a device without iMessage?