Why can't my Nextel phone receive Sprint text messages?

February 1, 2008 4:13 PM

My Nextel phones can't receive text messages from people on the Sprint network. I can send them messages, and I can receive messages from other networks, it's just getting messages from Sprint. The Nextel people have been unable to give me an answer. What could the problem be?

Recently my company switched to Nextel for the Push-to-talk option. The first phone I got was a Blackberry 700i, but the speaker was broken and had the chance to switch to a phone that Nextel assured me would be able to receive text messages -- I wouldn't be able to send SMS messages, they said, but I'd be able to receive them. I got my Motorola i930 today, and I still can't receive messages from Sprint.

Nextel customer support has been completely unhelpful. I've gotten everything from "Huh. That's weird" to "There's a national text messaging outage for Nextel blackberries," but no solid answer.

Any sort of information would be helpful. Is there a real reason why this is happening? Is there another Nextel phone that can receive sprint messages? If I'm on Nextel, and my friend's on Sprint, am I just out of luck with getting their text messages?

posted by lilac girl to technology (5 comments total)

Correction: It was a blackberry 7100i, not a 700i.
posted by lilac girl at 4:20 PM on February 1, 2008

99% of large push to talk accounts (typically those moving from Nextel to my carrier) that I've worked with request that all short and multi-media messaging (SMS and MMS) is blocked. If it's a company phone my money is on that.
posted by Octoparrot at 5:10 PM on February 1, 2008

I will point out I've regularly seen outages impact only RIM devices so that may be possible but they are VERY quick to fix these issues. If it is happening it is only impacting Nextel devices.
posted by Octoparrot at 8:20 PM on February 1, 2008

It's a Nextel/BlackBerry issue. SMS isn't possible by default when you're dealing with iDEN BlackBerrys. It's the same here in Canada on the telus iDEN network. I have gotten it to work a couple times by calling in and by chance talking to a person who knew what they were doing but by and large it doesn't work. To my knowledge its not an issue of blocking but an issue of compatibility. Every time I have gotten it to work, you receive the message, but not the sender info. So its basically useless.
posted by heavenstobetsy at 9:41 PM on February 1, 2008

Whoops. Totally didn't read your whole post. If you can't receive SMS on a normal Nextel cell phone, it is most likely being blocked for some reason. FYI, they may say that is has been unblocked to receive but these things can be bottlenecked sometimes and you may have to call in and ask them to remove and refresh your services.
posted by heavenstobetsy at 9:43 PM on February 1, 2008