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Virgin payg mobile: texts less than 160 basic characters long charged for twice over.

tweeter
tweeter Posts: 3,958 Forumite
Part of the Furniture
edited 24 April 2013 at 2:00PM in Techie Stuff
Have newish cheapo Huawei G6151 payg from Virgin mobile: some of the texts with a bit less than 160 basic characters long are charged twice over when sent. It asks if I want "2 sms text messages sent. Continue?". Tried to get their helpline to address it but failed. Anybody experienced something like this. Don't really want to traipse over to their shop if I can help it. Thanks for any replies.
Peel back your baby's eyelid to find no nationality or religious identity mark there. Peer at your baby's eyes for them to reflect back just people-throw away your flags and religious symbols...



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Comments

  • redux
    redux Posts: 23,001 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    edited 23 April 2013 at 2:19PM
    Are the phone message settings set to Unicode or some other augmented set of characters?

    The usual message length is I believe 140 bytes, which works out to 160 x 7-bits for the standard character set, but only 70 x 16 bits for Unicode
  • tweeter
    tweeter Posts: 3,958 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture
    I don't really know where to look for these settings. I'm using basic characters not anything fancy.
    Peel back your baby's eyelid to find no nationality or religious identity mark there. Peer at your baby's eyes for them to reflect back just people-throw away your flags and religious symbols...



  • redux
    redux Posts: 23,001 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Name Dropper
    On a couple of my Nokias the message settings has a section under texts called Character encoding, with 2 options Reduced support and Full support

    I'm assuming that's something like it, but otherwise I don't know
  • tweeter
    tweeter Posts: 3,958 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture
    edited 23 April 2013 at 2:47PM
    Under encoding it says ASC11 and there is another choice: Windows -1252 .

    Just tried the Windows -1252 choice with no luck.
    Peel back your baby's eyelid to find no nationality or religious identity mark there. Peer at your baby's eyes for them to reflect back just people-throw away your flags and religious symbols...



  • paddyrg
    paddyrg Posts: 13,543 Forumite
    On some phones, some symbols in the text will automagically force the message to be converted to unicode - is he using any special characters?
  • tweeter
    tweeter Posts: 3,958 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture
    edited 23 April 2013 at 7:30PM
    No special characters are being used just basic ones.
    Peel back your baby's eyelid to find no nationality or religious identity mark there. Peer at your baby's eyes for them to reflect back just people-throw away your flags and religious symbols...



  • paddyrg
    paddyrg Posts: 13,543 Forumite
    edited 23 April 2013 at 10:10PM
    I assume the phone settings language is set correctly? Does seem a bit rough to pay twice for each text.

    Edit - some Huawei devices only support unicode sms (from some developers forums), mostly ones sold exclusively in Asia, but who knows? Maybe virgin bought a cheap batch of phones without checking first?!
  • tweeter
    tweeter Posts: 3,958 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture
    edited 24 April 2013 at 1:36PM
    It doesn't charge twice for texts of say up to 100 characters, but for ones of above a 100 to 160 characters .

    It looks like I'll have to traipse over to their store to sort it out. Thanks for all your replies.
    Peel back your baby's eyelid to find no nationality or religious identity mark there. Peer at your baby's eyes for them to reflect back just people-throw away your flags and religious symbols...



  • bod1467
    bod1467 Posts: 15,214 Forumite
    Is there anything in the T&Cs about SMS length?
  • tweeter
    tweeter Posts: 3,958 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture
    I'm lead to believe that if the text is longer than 160 characters they charge twice.
    Peel back your baby's eyelid to find no nationality or religious identity mark there. Peer at your baby's eyes for them to reflect back just people-throw away your flags and religious symbols...



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