Project Fi SMS appears to be broken

N4Newbie

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Nov 15, 2012
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Can receive texts but "sent" texts are never received by the other party.

Google apparently aware of the problem and promise a fix within 24 to 48 hours.
 

Rukbat

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And they said 24 to 48 hours. Shame on them! They should have made you wait until tomorrow at least, huh?

(Google is usually pretty fast in fixing problems.)
 

N4Newbie

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And they said 24 to 48 hours. Shame on them! They should have made you wait until tomorrow at least, huh?

(Google is usually pretty fast in fixing problems.)

True, but I don't like the idea that problems like this one should happen at all.

And, by the way...

So, I initiated an online chat with Fi Support; it said an agent is usually available in 2 to 3 minutes. When the chat box opened, it said there were 196 people in the queue in front of me and it took close to 40 minutes before I got a live agent.

So, I told him that my SMS texts were not being received by the other party although I was able to receive their texts and I pointed out that Hangouts indicated that my texts were "Sent" complete with timestamp.

As soon as he started talking about "fixing" my phone, I jumped in and said, "Just to be clear, I have tried sending SMS's from hangouts.google.com also and the problem is the same, so I really don't think it has anything to do with my phone. Can you tell me if there are any network issues at the moment?"

He insisted (of course) that we "fix" my phone, so I played along and did the stuff he requested. When it still didn't work, I pointed out again that the problem is the same at hangouts.google.com and that "It sounds like a network problem to me..."

He asked me to wait while he checked with someone higher up and after a few minutes came back and said, yes, there is currently a know issue that they are working to fix and that it should be fixed in 24-48 hours.

I *knew* it was a network issue. Why was it my job to educate this support agent?
 

hallux

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I *knew* it was a network issue. Why was it my job to educate this support agent?

Because, like any other support team, they have a prescribed list of steps they need to follow. Without following those steps, any issues they escalate will come back because the questions were not answered. I see it all the time as a level 2 in a corporate environment, some of our KB (knowledgebase) articles have in bold letters "before escalating to xxx group, please provide the following information" and even though those steps may have been tried we have to do it again and provide proof.

A similar thing happened to me when I called a company about a failed monitor I had at home. I prefaced my call by saying I was a support tech and I had already done certain steps, and that the issue appeared even on the monitor's power-on splash screen. When I was asked to try another cable (I had anyway) my response was "how would that impact the power-on splash screen?" They quickly had a new display on the way to me.

I get that it's frustrating, but they "program" to the lowest denominator - people that are not always as knowledgeable about this stuff as we are. Yes, it would be nice if they allowed people to go "off-script" if the situation allows, or are quick enough to realize the answers were already given and catch up.