What happens if I send a text message to a landline?

Factual Questions
1

Suppose I’m trying to text somebody, but I accidentally select their home number instead of their cell when I’m picking the recipient. What happens after I hit send?

2

Depends on the carrier. Some services will translate your text via voice synthesis to deliver it to the landline. (Sprint charges a fee for this service, for example.) Others will send you an SMS reply saying the message can’t be delivered. Others will just have the message disappear into the void.

3

Why not send one and see what happens? :dubious:

I believe that when I’ve done this I get a note back from Verizon saying it was undeliverable due to the number not being enabled to receive text.

4

I just get a little error icon with a note that says “not sent”.

5

Because it might cost me money, as friedo pointed out.

6

It translates the text to voice for me, but I believe it’s the home phone that gets dinged with the nominal charge. (Bell Canada)

7

My carrier sends me back a message that ask if I want to pay to translate the text into voice. I just don’t respond that I want to. You could . . . call your carrier perhaps and ask them.

8

Here in the UK, the phone rings and a computerised female voice reads the text out to you. It’s quite amusing if the text includes abbreviations.

9

I did that the other day. Sent the text to the office number instead of my boss’s phone. I got nothing back at all. In case anyone is curious, my carrier is Verizon and her landline is Sprint.

10

I have received one of these, and it was translated and left on my answering machine. Not sure what carrier the sender was using. I think my home phone was Verizon at the time, but it could have been AT&T.

11

It was Tom Baker for a little while in the UK

12

I have Verizon and I get a text message back that says it’s a landline and can’t receive texts.

13

Or as happened to me it waits til two o’clock in the morning… causes a panic to answer this obviously very important phone call, reads it out in a robotic voice thats somehow taken six hours to arrive…

14

Yep. I have AT&T and I just tried it to see what would happen, and I got an invalid number message back. I didn’t realize some carriers will actually voice it for you.