o2 MMS Hidden Charges

strawbkisses · 17 December 2014 at 11:50AM

Hi everyone,

I have recently found out that o2 have removed MMS allowance from their smartphone tariffs. You now have to pay an extra £5 a month for the MMS bolt on which allows up to 50 MMS.

Now, I didn't think that I needed the bolt on as I rarely ever send picture messages. However, I did not realise that if a SMS goes over 160 characters, or has an emoticon, it converts to an MMS, therefore you get charged for it. There is no information about this on the o2 website, I have put in a formal complaint as I feel that they are not being transparent about the charges people might run up because they are not told clearly about this.

Has anyone else had issues with this, or is it just me? Feels like the data roaming saga all over again!

grumbler · 17 December 2014 at 12:25PM

strawbkisses wrote: »

... However, I did not realise that if a SMS goes over 160 characters,... There is no information about this on the o2 website

SMS stands for Short Message Service that implies some limit.
http://service.o2.co.uk/IQ/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE?New,Kb=Companion,question=ref%28User%29:str%28Mobile%29,CASE=12982

or has an emoticon,

This depends on the phone or app you use: Got a Samsung phone? You could get charged extra

Also, some phones automatically split long SMS into several shorter ones, some send them as one MMS, so this depends on the phone in some degree too.

indesisiv · 17 December 2014 at 12:25PM

I didn't think that phones automatically convert nowadays? I think that some of the older Samsungs still do. But you should be able to turn this off.
There are not many tariffs as far as I have seen that include mms messages as standard.

strawbkisses · 17 December 2014 at 12:43PM

My point is that o2 should be making that clear to customers as they are the ones profiting

strawbkisses · 17 December 2014 at 12:45PM

Also, an sms which is longer than 160 characters could be sent as 2 messages rather than an mms?

Rusty! · 17 December 2014 at 12:59PM

That's how most phones handle it, yes (and it's down to the phone to chose whether to split the message or make it an MMS, nothing to do with O2).

o2 MMS Hidden Charges

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