Sudden International SMS issue

[ElleM]

Hello

I've had an S21 Ultra (SC-52B) since last Spring. I  only use International SMS rarely  and everything was working fine, but now messages sent from overseas are not getting to my phone. (Domestic SMS both send and arrive no problem)

Just a bit of geographical background. I am actually in Japan and trying to receive SMS from the UK. Samsung doesn't have a big presence here and they don't have communities like this which is why I'm asking here.

I have spent hours on calls to my phone provider and they've run through the usual checks and found no obvious reason for this.

The phone came with the provider's own message app (called +Message) as default, but I've also tried using Messages from the Play Store and it's the same problem.

Suddenly not receiving International SMS seems like such a specific problem that I was wondering if I'm missing some kind of setting/check/update.

Thanks in advance.

[-Robot-]

It may just be Japanese network being a di*k, but we won't know that

[ElleM]

Yeah, they put a new sim in a couple of days ago, but still no international sms.

They phoned today and admitted they've never had such an issue. I mentioned about the sim data, so it's being moved up to more senior advisers now.  

Normally you can look up a problem and someone somewhere has had the same, but this one brings up nothing. Even google is stumped.  I may have to learn telecommunication network  engineering and solve it myself!

[Bobgnv]

I also ran into problems. Each text came in such that I had to click to download it. If it was a group text, it would then "move" from the sender to the group chat. Often the texts simply would not download unless I rebooted. Quite a pain. All my friends had iPhones which seemed to operate flawlessly. I've been loyal to samsung for years but this (combined with an inability to easily share large files as my friends do with airdrop) is putting me over the edge. I may have to switch with my next phone.

[Kaallii]

Hi, I also have had this problem since switching to samsung. When I put my sim from my iphone into my new samsung phone a couple years ago, I could send out international sms but not recieve a single text in return- both phones are on the tmobile network so nothing in the network changed, just the phone. It is STILL LIKE THIS!!!! I am also about to go abroad again and this nonsense is about to make me go back to iphone which is disappointing.

Did anyone have any luck on figuring out a fix? Desperate at this point. Also any tech telling you no one's ever had this problem is lying to you, seriously.

[ElleM]

Hi, I was the original OP and the problem did get resolved, but not 100% sure how. I do know that it wasn't the phone itself (cos I could receive sms fine if I put a friend's SIM in my phone) I basically pushed and pushed the provider and asked them if reprovisioning the SIM could be done. At first they were like "No, no, we can't do that" I talked about changing to a different carrier and they called back and said "We'll try something remotely, it may not work, please wait a while" and then not long after, it all worked again...make what you will of that, but my suspicions that it was a problem on the carrier's side all along were pretty much confirmed.