Charged for picture messages-it's costing me 83p a time,please help

[Biba59]

I too have realised that I am being charged for picture messages, explanation was if wi fi signal not strong enough will be charged. I've only just noticed this and my home wi fi is EE why is this happening, as on whatsapp supposed to be free. I am having a refund when Bill produced. Not happy 

[bristolian]

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@Ausgael wrote:

There were 150000 people. Of the infrastructure couldn’t cope with this number of people could the iMessage have been corrupted into an MMS?

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At events of 150k people across multiple days, there tends to be temporary sites installed which will substantially increase the radio capacity.

In any case, when any internet-based activity is attempting usage over a busy radio network, the outcome of any congestion is simply a slowdown in speeds until - eventually - activity fails. iOS may have a facility to attempt to send messages using an alternative medium, if the primary one isn't available. It's certainly not a network function, neither would the radio network cause one type of message to become another.

[Ausgael]

Do have any suggestions as to why I got charged as an MMS multiple times instead of a single iMessage? 

[william1066]

Disabling MMS on your iPhone will stop the iPhone using MMS if you accidentally send an image via the iMessage app and it can't send it via a normal data connection.

[Ali_A]

Although this is an old thread, we're continuing to see traction on this page, so I just wanted to clarify some of the questions asked and update with further information. 

There are two ways of sending messages- either using the mobile network messaging system, or a 3rd party messaging service such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Messenger, etc. 

Messages sent through your phone default messaging service pass securely through the network as an SMS or MMS. These may be chargeable. 

Any messages sent via 3rd party services usually only use internet data to perform this, and so are not "seen" by the network therefore will not incur a messaging charge through your bill. 
 
However, there are times when some 3rd party messaging services, such as iMessage, may default to traditional network messaging for a number of reasons. You can find out more about this at our helpful Why some text messages are converted to photo messages page. 

Good news though, more recently the default messaging app on many popular devices have began to utilise RCS messaging. RCS is a messaging service that, like 3rd party app, uses data rather than a mobile network to send messages, and so messages sent using RCS will also not incur any additional charges. You can find out more at RCS messaging through EE

Ali