Tele Choice (Kogan) Customers - Question about MMS

Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 13:00
Last edited 29/05/2015 - 15:05

Today my wife flipped out at me because her bill was $50 instead of $25. Since she hasn't exceeded her calls the culprit had to be MMS. Though she denied sending more than 3 of them this month (knowing its $0.50 each time).

Before you say it, yes she does use VIBER to send most of her pictures to people, but her technology-inept family won't install Viber so she's forced to use SMS for them.

Update: So I figured it all out and have edited this post to avoid further confusion.

It's her phone (Samsung Galaxy S5) automatically turning them into MMS once the chars exceed 480 (or beyond 3 joined SMS).

So in her settings I've made 2 changes:

  1. "Alert when converting to MMS", she'll then know what coming.
  2. Reject all outgoing MMS, so if somehow she misses the warning, it won't send anyway.

Very strange as from time to time I've sent the odd essay text and never had this problem on my phones past or present (Note3, Note1, Nokia E65 ….)

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Comments

  • SirNed on 29/05/2015 - 13:03
    +1

    Cant answer your question but what happens if you disable the MMS settings. (Change a few so they cant go as such)? Only asking as we had the same issue with my missus sending a few MMS's so I have disabled it but havent been able to check yet.

    • Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 13:07

      Good suggestion, I'll have a look at her phone later and try that. It's a Samsung Galaxy S5 (stock rom). That'll be interesting to see if it forces to SMS or simply rejects long messages entirely.

      I'll report back, should be easy to confirm with a super long text sent to my phone.

      (On a side note, it's a real shame Lyca Mobile changed their Unlimited plan. I joined it for $19/month and it was amazing. Then it cut the 5GB to 2.5GB for $29/month, bit of a shock but still decent. Now it's $39 and 1GB, I checked out at that point)

      • Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 13:20

        Okay I had a play with her phone and found out a few things.

        Firstly I enabled the "Alert when converting to MMS" to confirm at what point it changes between the two.

        Secondly I enabled the reject MMS mode so even if she does go too far it shouldn't send at all. I couldn't actually test this to my phone as my provider (still Lyca for a few days) doesn't even receive MMS.

        FYI though:

        480 chars is the SMS limit with TC.
        481 (going from 3 to 4 SMS is where it changes to 1KB MMS)

  • spackbace on 29/05/2015 - 13:56

    Tell your wife to just call ;) 481+ characters is a lot of text!

    • Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 14:08
      +2

      Tell me about it, she sends >1000 text a month. 50 of those happened to be >480 chars.

      She also calls a lot, so she's generally always at >90% calls by the end of her month.

      Women… :P

  • mskeggs on 29/05/2015 - 14:06

    I have had an issue where if I reply to an MMS with just a short text, it sends as MMS with accompanying charges.
    Maybe something like this is contributing?

    • Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 14:10

      Yes that. That's what I first looked for because this same thing used to happen to me when I was on LiveConnected. Not always but occasionally. Of course I didn't care because it was all free in the cap but I did notice it. But I can rule that out, i checked and it's only on her long messages, none occured on short replies to a MMS.

  • MadMaxBargainRoad on 29/05/2015 - 14:59
    +1

    There are settings within the SMS app to stop this kind of conversion. If you have the right box checked, the SMS app would send multi text-based message instead of one MMS.

    PS: I dont believe Telechoice has control over this as they are simply billed by Telstra.

    • Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 15:00

      Right, it appears to be the phone doing it on the local side. Strange that a modern Samsung Galaxy S5 does that, none of my phones ever did that. Not that I send essay texts often.

      • MadMaxBargainRoad on 29/05/2015 - 15:06
        +1

        It's controlled by the default SMS app instead. I know it's stupid but most phone's default SMS app has this option enabled.

        • Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 15:08

          yeah so bizaar, both the option to convert and the limit in the first place. I only send 30-50 SMS a month personally, but there have been occasions where I've sent massive 500+ char texts and this has performed perfectly normal on all my phones (Note3, Note1, Nokia E65… getting old beyond there)

          Updated OP anyway to avoid further confusion. Thanks for your input.

  • plmko on 29/05/2015 - 15:25

    Not sure about MMS, but Telechoice provide free unlimited SMS within Australia. Anyway what's the point of asking here, get into your account and look up your history.

    • Click_It on 29/05/2015 - 16:07

      I was never questioning how to find it, I figured that out straight away by downloading the Invoice. It's when she denied sending 50 MMS that I investigated further. Got my answers now.

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