Sprint MMS over WiFi broken? Try this
For the past couple of months I’d been having issues when at home or work receiving any MMS over WiFi. Text messages worked fine, and I could usually send an MMS but when I received an incoming, even it if was just a text MMS, I’d get a message to attempt to retry the download.
TL;DR version: Try disabling WiFi calling, even if you’re not currently connected. May be Sprint specific, may be Paul specific.
Retrying while on WiFi would eventually time out with nothing downloaded, and the only way to retrieve a message was to switch to cell data, then wait for a while or reboot the phone. Considering how abysmal service is at my house, the rebooting the phone may have just given it the opportunity to download as I put the thing down and walked away.
A few days ago there was a large conversation between several people where I basically had to sit on cell service (0-1 bar LTE, or 3G getting 0.3Mbps) for a couple of hours as we coordinated things via group MMS, so decided to get on with Sprint chat support.
During that time the problem mysteriously disappeared, only to reappear a little later. I did some testing and at home it failed, at work it failed, but at a friend’s house it worked. I thought to blame Comcast, which honestly if I run out of gas I’d love to blame Comcast for it these days after what they’ve put me through, but all were Comcast connections.
I noticed I received an MMS notification this morning. It didn’t download the MMS, the notification was to retry the download. I also noticed I had WiFi calling with a red line through it because one of my WiFi points isn’t configured and I was connected to that one.
Sleep brain told fingers to turn off WiFi to get MMS, sleep body turned off WiFi calling instead. I realized I’d hit the wrong thing and was about to disable WiFi when “pantang!” an MMS came in.
A couple of experiments I did tend to back up that when WiFi calling is enabled, even if it’s not online, I’m not getting MMSes via Google Hangouts or the stock messaging system.
What’s up with that, don’t know. It’s been the fix for my HTC One M9, which seemed to have the problem out of the box however. It’s unfortunate that I have to use Sprint WiFi calling, but I’ve gotten tired of people going to voicemail because my phone doesn’t pick up that it’s supposed to ring.
What’s really a bit off about the whole thing is I had this problem on my HTC One M8. I factory reset and set the M8 up as my wife’s phone, including WiFi calling. My old phone running the same software I was running, with WiFi calling enabled, doesn’t have the problem it had when I was activated on it.
