SMS are sent (and charged for) multiple times

[Michael Zanetti]

When there is poor network coverage, it often happens that SMS are sent multiple times. They appear only once in the messages app, but the other end receives them multiple times (up to 5 times I believe).

In the example of the attached screenshots, the sender never received the confirmation that it actually succeeded, the receiver however received the message multiple times. Also the operator will charge for each sent instance. I have seen other cases where eventually the confirmation comes through after, say, 3 attempts and it stops retrying.

I'm not really sure about what to do if the confirmation doesn't come through the network, but as I've never seen this issue with other phones, I think it must be something like the retries being sent with a different ID, so the operator cannot match the message to previous attempts? Or perhaps the timeout for waiting for the reply is just too short?

[Alfonso Sanchez-Beato (alfonsosanchezbeato)]

@mzanetti, are you completely sure the operator is charging for the duplicate messages? I have seen duplicates occasionally under bad network conditions, but the operator charged only one message in the end.

Also, note that when you use non-ASCII characters the message can be split and generate multiple individual SMS messages, that are in this case charged individually. The char count per SMS can drop quite a lot when doing this, see bug #1480554.

[Michael Zanetti (mzanetti)]

@abeato: Yes. My outbox has 6 SMS for January, my phone bill has 11 of them, which matches the receivers end.

Also, if you look at the screenshots, you'll notice that the messages are not split, but the full message is copied multiple times.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.