Sending and receiving text messages on a landline

[dbridson]

I’ve just purchased a shiny new landline phone and I’m somewhat disappointed that I can’t transfer all the contacts to it via Bluetooth as I could with my previous, 15-year-old model. (I know, I should have read the spec more carefully.) However, I gather that I can (in theory) send vcards via SMS from my mobile to my new phone (which does indeed support SMS). Those vcards can then be saved to my phone’s contacts list. Unfortunately, there appears to be a couple of stumbling blocks to get over before I can do this:  (1) I need my landline to be SMS-enabled first and an advisor at EE just told me that couldn’t be done (despite the fact that EE’s parent company BT does offer that with its BT Text service); and (2) if she was wrong, I still have no idea how to obtain the appropriate SMS service centre number. If anyone with knowledge of this issue could offer me some advice, that would be very gratefully accepted.

[dbridson]

Sorry, @XRaySpeX, I assumed it was just BT that preprogrammes its SMS Service Centre numbers into the phones it supplies. I wish Siemens did. Anyway, yes, I did try sending that REGISTER text a couple of hours ago, and guess what...? Just looked at my mobile and all three of my test messages have arrived together in the past few minutes, so the SMS send function now seems to be working okay. Hurrah! Sadly, my response to the last message just resulted in a call from BT's voice text service, despite the CLIP being on (apparently). It’s a start, though. I might try a few of the different SMS Service Centre numbers listed here to see what happens: https://www.bt.com/content/dam/bt/help/legacy-ug/new-pdf/BT%20SMS%20Text%20service%20centre%20number.... Many thanks for your continued interest. 

[XRaySpeX]

So, SMS does work over EE landlines using the BT Text system.

I once had trouble with receiving SMS as voice texts & the way round it was to send the REGISTER to 00000 again to reset everything. 

Alternatively you could try sending *1# to 00000.

FYI: Set up and use BT Text 

[dbridson]

Thanks very much for your perseverance, @XRaySpeX, I appreciate it. Yes, if nothing else, we’ve established that EE landlines actually can be SMS-enabled, and someone in the company’s support team really ought to make a note of that. Unfortunately, having tried your suggestions for re-texting 000000 and entered every single SMS Service Centre number variation listed in that BT DECT phone listing, I’m still not able to receive texts in data format on my Gigaset phone. (I tried the company’s support line but their advisor’s response was “get the information from your service provider”. (Not entirely helpful, given that the SMS Service Centre receiving number seems likely to vary by the model of DECT phone rather than anything the provider does.) I can’t think of anything else to try, so I’m reduced to threatening the supplier with a return for refund unless Siemens get their SMS feature to work as advertised. I’ll let you know if I get a sensible response to that.