What would prevent someone living in CH to text someone living in Canada?
I can send a text from Canada and it is received in CH...no problem.
It used to work...but for some reason...no texts are able to be sent...
any ideas?

It might be the type of contract you now have. For example family contracts sometimes have foreign calls and texts blocked. Check the limits of your contract, ring your provider and get this function unblocked.

that's a rare one, never heard of someone being blocked for SMS. what catches some people out on holiday is they send the sms to the number in their contacts. if it is not set up for international dialling then the service provider tries to send it to the local equivalent.

so in your case (i know its the other way round, but i don't know the mobile area codes in CA) you have 079 1234 in your contacts and sending it in canada would fail or is sent to the CA equivalent, instead you need +41 79 1234.

I store all my numbers in international format so i don't get caught out on that one.

I've been blocked before for both and known people blocked from sending to me too.
But of course it could easily be the international code being missing, that's a common mistake.

ok, let me try again (c;

what do you guys mean by: blocked/prevented from sending?

how does it manifest itself? is it 'silent' with no warning? some of my apparently received (also only a few sent by me) MMS go into black holes but with SMS as far as i know all mine seem to get delivered, i have 'reports delivered' enabled on my network.

all things being equal (i.e. you are using the international number(c; ) then there are any number of reasons why the SMS would not get through: new years day @00h01 tends to overload the local systems so they 'bounce' them back to you saying something like 'could not deliver'; similar problem on the recipient network; is it just one network or is it CA in general?; maybe the network you are sending to has gone bust or perhaps other technical problems.

I can't send text messages to Canada either, none of my friends get them. You can send texts online - Bell, Rogers, Telus etc. - this was how the hubby and I sent messages when I was still there and he was here. Doesn't help if you need to send one when you're not near a computer....

Here is a link if the person has a Bell phone: http://www.txt.bell.ca/bell/en/

I have no problems sending or receiving SMS to/from my friend in Quebec.

I agree that the international code is often the source of problems dialling to or from North America (experienced this many times through work contacts over there).

001 to dial North America
01141 to dial Switzerland from North America

Drop the first "0" of the rest of the number.

Sorry if that seems like teaching Granny to suck eggs but sometimes the simple bits are overlooked.

Are you with one of the cheap prepaid providers, I'm curious?

Sandgrounder ... most phones / networks (if not all of them) also understand the + thingy.

All numbers in my phone are programmed like this (obviously without the leading zero for European area codes)

+41xxxxxxxx for CH numbers
+49xxxxxxxxxx for D numbers
+1xxxxxxxxxx for US / CAN numbers
etc.

Usually SMS'es from anywhere to anywhere work fine nowadays. Used to be different 5 years ago when you couldn't even send a TXT from one U.S. carrier to the next.

Another thought occurred to me. You say it "used to work" - perhaps the provider changed the number prefix? Sometimes they do that if the demand is high and they run out of numbers in the original format.

My old UK mobile number was upgraded from 07113 to something else (can't remember now as it was ages ago) then after a 6 month grace period where both numbers worked it switched entirely over to the prefix.

It has to do with contracts between telecommunications countries. 2.5 years ago, I was in the US for a few months on mobile phone provider A (can't remember who, hence the naming). I was texting people left and right with no issues. I then switched to mobile phone provider B, and some txt messages stopped coming through. I had no idea why, and the local tech support couldn't figure it out... txt messages with orange customers worked, but Swisscom customers couldn't send me txt messages (they could get mine).

Long story short, a Swisscom customer called up their support and got the skinny. Not every provider has a deal with every other provider worldwide. I never did get a good answer as to why some could receive but not send, but I suspect that some providers attempt to pass messages to other networks regardless of deals in place. This is much more of an issue with MMS than SMS these days, but it still happens occasionally with SMS.

If you've got the same problem, there's probably not much you can do, though you can try calling your support line.

Cheers
Lance

Edit: I missed the "used to work" bit, but did you by any chance change providers? Did the recipient?

I have 2 phones here, a SwissCom from work and a Yallo pay as you go that I got when I first moved here. I keep the Yallo one for the cheap international texting although use my work phone alot... and I text to Canada most days.

My personal experience is that if the person you are texting is with Rogers.... no problem. The people at home who have Bell, well its another story, some go through some dont, and it has been this way for the past 2 years.

I would get your friends in Canada to check with their provider because my experience tells me that it is probably on their end.

Thanks to everyone...
keep the help coming.
I was asking because my friend lives in CH.
He got a new phone which won't let him sms Canada.
Strange in this day and age to not be able to text North America from Europe!!

How about sending texts to the U.S.? Does anyone know what to dial first before the phone number? I tried 001 +area code and phone number and that didn't work.