The other day my cable modem was malfunctioning, so I went to text a friend to see if the whole cable system was down. Oddly enough, my texts were all failing to send also.
After thinking it over for a bit, I decided I would disable Wi-Fi on my Phone and see if it mattered -- it did. I turned Wi-Fi back on and the texts were failing again.
It then dawned on me that the iPhone must be attempting to use Wi-Fi to send text messages when available.
What sense does this make? None to a customer, because AT&T isn't going to treat it any differently than one sent over the cellular network. The only benefit there would be faster transmitting, especially in the case of MMS messages.
But to AT&T, it makes a lot of sense because the text message doesn't have to use their cellular infrastructure, and thus is practically free to them. The shady thing here however is that they are going to still treat it the same way on your cellphone bill, and you could be hit with text overages even though technically they are providing less of a service.
I guess I can accept this (do I have much of a choice?), but the disappointing part of it is that when Wi-Fi SMS timed out, it didn't fall back on cellular SMS.
