AT&T’s wholly-owned Aio Wireless subsidiary has officially confirmed weeks of recent speculation regarding a nationwide rollout of the brand and service following a successful soft launch in select markets earlier this year. The Aio Wireless brand and service is meant to be AT&T’s response to other such initiatives such as T-Mobile’s GoSmart and other flat-rate carriers such as MetroPCS and Cricket, which AT&T is in the process of purchasing.
The crux of Aio Wireless is the opportunity to take advantage of AT&T’s 3G and LTE networks at flat monthly rates compared to AT&T’s other prepaid brand in GoPhone, with plans starting at $40 and going up to $70 which include all taxes and fees as well as varied high-speed data allotments, from 250MB to 7GB for the lowest and highest priced plans respectively.
The expansion also follows the initial success of Aio in the soft launch markets of Florida, Texas and Georgia, though the launch hasn’t been without some controversy, as its logo color scheme is very similar to T-Mobile’s copyrighted shade of Magenta, a fact that didn’t escape T-Mobile CEO John Legere and forced the company to file suit against AT&T earlier this week.
The big bummer in all this though. Its always something it seems is people should be aware that Aio does not support short code messaging . Which is impt to people like me who get them like UPS alerts, bank messages, and other free Hotel promos and stuff like that. Strange part to me is I don’t know why they don’t allow them and were just talking about the FREE ones too & AT&T’s own GoPhone which im currently using unlocked Tmobile phone on lets them through as well as Tmobile prepaid allows them & Metro, Cricket etc.. I have reached out to Aio & they say they are working to add this impt feature. When they do I will probably switch. They don’t list in there terms anywhere either that I could see that they don’t support short code sms.
Most carriers and providers don’t provide shortcode support because it’s an additional cost that is passed down through a third-party gateway service that’s unaffiliated with the carrier, making it expensive to subsidize unless volume deals are cut with gateway services beforehand.
That Aio isn’t piggybacking on AT&T’s current shortcode support means that Aio really is being run as more of a standalone subsidiary. To put this in perspective, Tracfone AT&T service across all brands piggybacks off of AT&T’s domestic shortcode support agreements, which includes everything from banking and shipping services to TV show voting and coupons.
Does tracfone that uses At&T support them now.. ? I thought that actually Net10 & StraightTalk were the actually the only main ones who don’t & they state it in there terms whereas the problem too is Aio doesn’t that I could find & they are going to have disappointed folks esp if they don’t resolve this with the upcoming nationwide launch. I did get an encouraging reply from there FB page though at least with the following – Hi Creighton! We know this feature is very important to our customers. We don’t have a launch date quite yet, but our team is working to hard to make it happen soon.. So hopefully it will happen sooner then later & then ill prob gladly switch to them. Makes sense what you said but I still was surprised there not supporting this when most of all the others do.. I am glad I did my homework first whereas some people & a couple others have also commented after they got service that they were upset that they weren’t advised this wasn’t included.
I’ve used shortcode messaging on my StraightTalk Nokia E71 since 2011 for Twitter, PayPal, Facebook and Redbox to this day with no problems. I’ve read the ST TOS and even though I’ve stated before that the vast majority of it is legally tenuous, I’ve never had an issue with incoming shortcode SMS being delivered or sent unless the gateways themselves were having issues.
I’m led to believe that Tracfone (the company) downplays shortcode support with legalese in order to avoid extreme volume surcharges from the current virtual operator agreement. I understand why the restriction is in place, as the scourge of premium SMS services were a real issue in the middle of the decade and they can cause major issues with billing on prepaid, but incoming SMS alerts shouldn’t be an issue now with the ubiquity of unlimited text messaging.
Gotcha. & thanks for reply again . Ya I know Cricket used to not let any of them really through & thats changed. metro actually advertises it as a feature. Im sure you know that, And most carriers actually more support them then don’t. Just was strange to me again I guess that Aio currently doesn’t when GoPhone etc does. So I will not switch until they fix it. I was going to recommend them too. But will not yet. It doesn’t seem like it should be hard for them to add this too. And again im only wanting the free ones nothing that you have to sign up & pay for. So I have really brought it to there attention & am hoping that they are gonna have this fixed soon in conjuction with the widespread rollout. Again it seems like it’s always something! right. haha.
Hey Humberto buddy maybey you could have a little leverage for me and send them a message or something abt this??. Maybey would help speed things along esp since they aren’t putting in there terms etc anywhere on there site that they don’t support this. It would really be the only thing I can see that’s gonna hault me from switching over to them..
I’ll bring it up with their reps, but it does take a bit of time to implement. Best I can do at the moment is bring up the issue in a new post.
Sounds good Thanks much!!
Another person replied to me that wondered why there amber alerts! went away using aio & now they know . See its an important feature. I feel like im on a mission now! And your help is appreciated as I always have loved your site for being such a good advocate! More people should know of phonenews.com