Viking Telecom?

Well, I believe I may have solved the mystery of why the text messages I have sent to my family and friends in Iceland have not gotten through. Turns out that to send an international text message from a Verizon phone in the U.S. to a phone in Iceland, I have to know which particular company the recipient in Iceland is using. If they are on Siminn (Iceland Telecom) then I have to add a 7 in front of their phone number (but after the country code). If they are on a network referred to by Verizon as "Viking Telecom", then I have to add a 10 in front of their phone number.

I have no idea what Viking Telecom is, and a Google search did not help much, except that it might be more generally known as Viking Wireless, and it is NOT Vodafone. This means, as far as I can tell, that there is no way for me to send text messages to Hjördís and Ko-leen, since I am pretty sure they are both on Vodafone. My attempts to send them text messages last week did not go through, anyhow.

For any text messages that do get through, Verizon is going to charge me 25 cents to send, and 20 cents to receive. This might not seem that expensive to anyone not using the extra cell phone line on the plan their parents have, but then that would not be me.

So, for any of my friends and family who are not regularly on facebook, and who would like me to be able to say hello to them, please let me know what phone company you have. And also get my parent's permission.

Comments

Lissy said…
The Tracfone my brother gave me is even worse. Their website says "TRACFONE service does not allow international text messages. Attempting to send international messages could result in service deactivation."
January 14, 2011 at 12:26 PM
Anonymous said…
go to ja.is or vodafone.is and send the free text messages from there. They won't be able to reply by pressing "reply" but it works from abroad and is free too :þ
January 14, 2011 at 1:02 PM
Anonymous said…
yes and afaik there's no Viking Telecom, Nova, Alterna and V&F are phone companies I can think of, besides Síminn and Vodafone.
January 14, 2011 at 1:04 PM
Jon Frimann said…
The "Viking Telecom" is IMC Iceland or Alterna for the new version of that minor phone company. They had the ID "IS Viking".

See here, http://www.worldcell.com/HTML/IMC.php

But I did not know that you had to add a system suffix to the phone numbers in the U.S.

Here are the MNC codes, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Network_Code#I
January 14, 2011 at 3:18 PM
Ko-Leen said…
I'm on NOVA! and http://www.nova.is/content/ does a free sms sending, bottom right corner of the page :)
January 15, 2011 at 10:23 PM
Harpa Jónsdóttir said…
Free text messages are the thing - as Hildigunnur says!
January 16, 2011 at 6:16 PM
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