Toby Atkin-Wright

A new ASDA superstore opened in Dundee recently. Conveniently close to work, I’ve made a couple of lunchtime trips there, plus doing last week’s weekly shop.

http://storelocator.asda.com/store/dundee_west

They offer a free wifi service. Easy to sign up for, they say that they work with Mumsnet to meet the “Family-Friendly Wifi” standard, and refer customers to the Mumsnet web site for more details. No problem, I thought: nothing I use the internet for would offend Mumsnet.

http://www.mumsnet.com/family-friendly/wifi

When I got home from doing the weekly shop, Kate asked me why I hadn’t responded to the messages she’d sent me. I hadn’t received them. I thought at the time that the internets must have been playing up.

But yesterday lunchtime I was on a mission to buy fizzy drinks and crisps for our team game-playing evening, and when I tried sending a message to the team to ask how much diet vs. full-fat Coke I should buy, I found that my phone wouldn’t send the message. I had to disconnect from the ASDA wifi before the iPhone Message app would allow me to send or receive messages.

(A note about iMessage: iPhones use the data network to send messages where possible, so as to avoid using SMS/MMS quotas, to allow group messaging, to allow media content in messages, and to allow sending messages to non-SMS-capable devices like iPods, iPads, and Macs. If wifi is present, it will use that rather than routing the messages over the mobile data network.)

So it appears that ASDA’s free wifi blocks messaging on iOS devices. Which is a pain. Should I blame ASDA or Mumsnet for this?