Texting problem after Suncom buyout

[ibncahira]

Hello to all, I am new here and looking for advice.
I am one of the former Suncom folks that is now T Mobile. I have been looking forward to the switch for months since I have never received coverage at my home with my cell. For about a year I maintained a contract with Alltel just for reliability (I am in eastern NC). However, I have a need for an unlocked GSM quadband phone since my husband lives in Italy and I make frequent trips there. Alltel won't play nice with international correspondence, so I was thrilled to get a phone with Suncom where I could text internationally and simply swap sims when I go to Italy.
I recently cancelled my Alltel, since my phone got wet and I didn't want to buy a whole new one...I hoped for the best in reception improvement with T Mobile. Well the reception is the same at my house, and now my husband does not receive my text messages. I get his fine. Mine says message sent and customer support sees in my account that I have sent it, but it goes floating off into space or something. Anyone else having a texting problem?

I have friends here that are using their Italian sims and picking up local coverage. I swapped sims with one and the message went through from my phone to my husband. I sent messages to 2 different Italian networks on my sim to Wind and Vodafone and both went through. (However, since they are using local coverage it was probably a redundant test). My husband is on Wind.

I have gone over my settings with Customer Care several times and they see no blocks, my settings are all good. We even replaced my old Suncom sim with a new T Mobile sim. I think that my next action will be to request to close the account and open it new and fresh. Since about Labor Day weekend, we have mutually spent about $200 in international calling. The texting is an important routine for us for our daily information "Im 20 minutes from the house" type of stuff so we can coordinate our daily skype FREEEE internet calling. (that one text is important because I do not have coverage at my house...EEK!)

If there are any ideas, I would appreciate it. I have a T Mobile SDA Smartphone that I bought on Ebay before the company switch. Worked great before and does everything but text now. Now I have to go recharge my calling card...again.

Thanks in advance!

[AnthroMatt]

Sometimes closing the account and reopening it (or rather removing the entire plan and then re-adding it) does work if there is a strange code somewhere in your account. I wouldn't think the measures would be so drastic, but it may come to that.

Your friends Italian SIMs...do you know if they roam onto T-Mobile or AT&T? It's possible since Suncom/T-Mobile don't provide great AT&T might be a better option.

I am not as well versed on GSM, so I am sorry I can't provide more help.

[ibncahira]

I think that my friends are roaming on Cingular. I will go to ATT today to take a look, but I need to make sure I have global coverage. What a pain.

[ibncahira]

I finally resolved the problem.
Suncom had an international agreement with Wind, but T Mobile does not. This was one of the first questions that I asked when theproblem came up, and the tech support assured me that Italy was not blocked in any way. So I patiently and stubbornly continued to resolve the matter.

Today, tech support finally found that T Mobile did not have the agreement with Wind. It does with Vodafone and Tim, which is instantly resolved by my husband going to the tobacco store to buy a sim card from one of those networks. There are no contracts or locked phones in Italy, and they have number portability between the networks. If tech support had really answered my initial question, we would have had just a day or 2 of interruption and not spent a fortune on international calling.