I am wondering if I am the only one with this challenge…
I want to my move all my voice / SMS / MMS mobile numbers to a VoIP carrier.. . but can’t since none in North America, including VoIP.ms, reliably enable send/receive of SMS/MMS to colleagues and family and friends internationally. So in order to retain this capability I must keep my primary mobile DID with traditional mobile carrier for voice / SMS / MMS.
Love to hear what other VoIP.ms customers think about this… perhaps if VoIP.ms see a demand they will prioritize this functionality?
Background:
Its been at least 10 years since North American SMS / MMS has been available from VoIP.ms and other VoIP providers… but there seems no action to resolve the lack of reliable international SMS/ MMS.
So I wanted to know what are VoIP providers such as VOIP.ms doing to get SMS / MMS working in the same way as the major mobile carriers do - locally and internationally?
As more and more people use VoIP the fact that VoIP SMS/MMS has this significant drawback compared to mobile providers is becoming a serious nuisance and prevents people from moving all their telecom needs to VoIP providers such as yourselves.
Honestly I don’t remember the last time I have sent an SMS. Most people have Data on their phone and use Messaging platforms like Whatsup, Telegram, Signal, Messenger etc.
Sure you need receiving SMS for 2FA but sending is not a priority for most people. For me a priority would be to expand the length of characters you can receive in a single SMS
I think what stops people from moving to Voip is:
You need a separate data connection on your smartphone, since you will not be around a wifi the whole time.
Some online services, including financial ones, reject a Voip number.
It still remains the best choice for people who need a second or more numbers.
My wife refuses to have a cell phone and uses the home phone as her number.
We have received SMS messages forwarded to email where she can read them, great for multi-factors that send confirmation to SMS but not Email. So far we have not had anyone refuse to send an SMS to our voip.ms number, but it was originally a telco ILEC number (not a Bandwidth or Onvoy number).
The ability to reply to an SMS via email has been handy. With our former provider I would need to log in to the web portal to “reply Y to confirm” when a business required confirmation of adding SMS to an account. We can also reply STOP and other commands easily.
On the topic for this thread, I have not tried an international SMS … I have no international contacts. With the differences in technologies I would not expect 100% compatibility from any carrier (including my US based cell phone).