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SMS Messaging Unreliable
Lovejoy writes "From a Reuters story: Keynote announced today that in its two-week, 26,000 message test-period 7.5% of its text messages never reached their destinations Ouch. I don't have SMS - Is this report consistent with your experience?"
that is actually a bit low. It's to see the failure rate has improved from 99/2000 when the rate was around double that or more.
apparently the european networks have this smoothedout a great deal - though messages are apparently still lost at peak periods.
Works here (in Finland) well enough. I'd say 99% of my messages reach their destination.
This is true for the UK sure, but if it fails you get a message back - always.
--
D
"CSLib Menace strikes back"
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
I don't know what kind of Short Messaging Service Center they have, but I live in portugal where all the telecoms have CMG SMSC's and I I have never seen 1 message lost!
And i use a SMS chat system where I receive around 100 messages per day...
It would be nice to see what the failure rates are among European carriers.
Down here is Australia SMS is (in my experience) 100% reliable. The only times I've had trouble has been over busy periods like Christmas, when a message might take a few hours to get to the recipient, rather than a few seconds.
I use SMS like I use email. In fact, it's nicer, since you don't have to wait for your friends/family to be at their PC (if they own one) and online.
I think the whole problem is with current business models of internet businesses -- with free services, the host really has no compelling reason to guarantee anything. It's a lot easier to just drop a message than to report and gracefully handle an error. Perhaps industry-wide slacking service (just like this) will soon lead to subscription-based messaging clients.
-Ben S.
test@gigglemail.com
so let's get together and start pounding, big boy
-Pete T.
I tend to get messages days later, if at all. When I was on vacation in Illinois (I live in California) I didn't get a single message sent to me, and my friends swear they sent several. I use Sprint, FYI.
So this is why I never get booty-SMS'es..
No, I don't have SMS either, and I loose 100% of of the text messages sent to me.
I am in England, and send about 300 text messages a month (minimum) and get reports when they are delivered (which means when someone claims they did not receive my message I know they are bluffing! Have used this to know a girl wasn't truthful with me before). I've very rarely had problems - usually delivery is near instantaneous. The only time I had problems was at New Years - networks were jammed and I could not send messages or place calls.
It would seem another poster was right in saying things here in Europe are better than in the States by the sound of it..
Sadly, yes. We do not use SMS or any similar text messaging service for reliable messaging as a result. E-mail to a pager gateway is far more reliable (99.99% or better, in my experience), and if you have a method for delivering directly to the paging provider, that's even better still.
If an SMS message is lost on the network, does it make a custom ringtone?
I had SMS on my cellphone when I was in India... Most networks in India use GSM- the same technology as that used in Europe.
Is was pretty common for messages to not be delivered at all, or be delivered after several hours. The problem seems to be especially severe if you send a message to a phone which is temporarily off the network (eg. out of range, or switched off). Sometimes messages get delivered right after the phone comes on, sometimes hours later (often if you receive a new SMS message, you suddenly also get a bunch of older messages too that were sent while you were off).
The figure of 7.5% doesn't surprise me at all.
SMS messages can be set to "expire" if the are not delivered in a certain amount of time. All the phones I've owned had this set to "now or never", so if the message couldn't be delivered at the moment it got trashed. Mos users, of course, have no idea this setting exists.
or because people get annoyed at mashing the 6 button three times for each 'o' that they give up typing in the message half-way through 7.5% of the time?
Again, recycled from Yahoo! news.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Yeah, this seems pretty consistent. This is basically why I still have to carry around this honking huge 2-way pager -- SMS just isn't reliable enough. On top of this, if your SMS message does actually reach its destination there can sometimes be quite a delay. The 2-way paging service delivers messages almost immediately. Oh yeah, and typing text on a phone keypad sucks...
AT&T got me started on SMS with a "free for now ..." package, then switched to one where incoming is free, and outgoing costs 10 cents each. So I adapted and basically never send a text message from my phone. However, it is handy that you can e-mail messages to an AT&T cell phone at 5055551234@mobile.att.net (i.e. insert appropriate phone number) for no cost. So I regularly e-mail my wife's cell phone from my desktop.
Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase
My girlfriend has an at&t phone and this is definitely consistent with what i've experienced...
It usualy works about 90% of the time here in Canada. It only gets annoying when in hotmail, how when you send a message, it only type's the first 20 characters of the page that says "Your message has been send".
...It depends on the network.
...hum... random.
Here in France, the worst I had is one SMS received like 3-4 hours late (both phone being on-line) out of like 200-300 SMS sent.
On the other hand I've worked w/ some other OTAC platforms (Over The Air Control) like in Egypt and Switzerland, and results were more
System.out.println("coucou");
i've never lost an SMS message, and like most college students i message a good 10 people multiple times a day. i've never had a problem with it.
"Martha Stewart can lick my Scrotum......do i have a scrotum?" -- Sharon Osbourne
I use SMS regularly here in California (with AT&T GRPS/GSM service), and I've experienced a lot of problems not so much with message losses but rather with delays.
The whole point of SMS messaging is that you know they'll be received and read within minutes. Very often, i receive SMS several hours late, which really defeats the whole purpose of messages such as "i'll be 10 minutes late"...
DZM
The best service was AT&T, internal SMS, but they still have a 2.2% failure rate. That really is pathetic. Surely a 99.9% success rate is more resonable?
I would be interested in seeing how they failed. Was it inside the networks? Or did the messages never leave the phone? What were the Telco excuses? WHY is SMS so unreliable?
People kinda get used to it so you have plausible deniabiliy when you pretend that a message from someone you don't like never got through.
Sure, the delivery rate is terrible, but I'm sure your carrier of choice makes sure they charge you for each and everyone that gets sent, despite it being received or not.
I find that SMS messages are particularily prone to failure when sending between different carriers. Here in BC for instance we have Telus, Rogers and Fido all providing SMS. When I send a message on Rogers to another Rogers subscriber, I have yet to lose a message. However, when I send messages to Telus or Fido, it's very hit and miss. From what I've heard on the street, the servers that handle the inter-network messaging are not very well run because the companies can just continue to blame each other instead of taking responsibility.
I've sent/received hundreds of SMSes while in places like China, Hong Kong, and Singapore -- I've never experienced any lost messages. There are absolutely no problems with messaging between cellular companies, or even different countries, for me. It's much cheaper than making calls in many situations.
The seamless interoperability of GSM standard (which almost all Asian and European countries use) is to me, one of the few examples where competition in the marketplace (like in the US cellular world) is actually counterproductive.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
I would have to say that number might be high for Europe (maybe about right for canada) but providers in the USA, that number is way off!! I got my girlfriend a phone so she could SMS me as she lives in the US and I live in Canada so sms is ideal way to send little messages with out the expense of a phonecall. Using VirginMobile service the loss rate of messages seem to range in the 70 to 80%. yes.. maybe 2 or 3 in 10 messages actaully hit my phone! It's crazy cause sometimes I can be in the same room testing them and it works fine, then same location just on a different day, no messages. Odd thing is my messages always seem to get to her, it's her messages coming back get lost somewhere...
I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. I have crappy coverage with my GSM phone here (unless I'm in a major urban area I don't get signal) but the loss of SMS messages just suck ass!
Ahhhh.. to be back in europe again, if they know at least one thing, it's how to make mobile service work! Got to love riding subways with signals..
I don't think I've ever had it completely drop a message. Sometimes there's a long delay (several hours) but that's rare; usually if I'm sitting at my desk I hear my phone beep before my mailreader has noticed that a new message has arrived.
It doesn't look like Sprint charges me extra for the duplicates, so it doesn't bother me too terribly much, though I'd prefer it if my phone would just suppress the dupes altogether rather than showing them with "Duplicate!" warnings.
used to work in a call center for an armoured truck company. Management went from using pagers to send the guards messages to using SMS. SMS was alot more unreliable. Sometimes they wouldn't recieve messages for up to 6 hrs! so much for saving a few dollars! they ended up losing some large contracts cause of this.
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
Well, duh.. they only waited two weeks!
irb(main):001:0>
Maybe he overloaded the network by sending 26,000 messages in a week?
I can see it now. Honey, I sent you a text page saying I'd be late, didn't you get it? What's this? Did you see that CNN article?
Voicemails on SprintPCS can show up days later without warning. I have checked my voicemail somedays several times, then checked it the next day, and get a message that was left 5 days ago (it's not an error with their timestamping, as the person confirms it was left days ago).
Pretty shitty.
I used SMS extensively with 2 different networks in Istanbul for a while before and I don't recall a single lost message. The US networks are already overloaded with stuff like camera phones etc, I wonder if SMS just isn't reliable under load..?
-bm
I don't have it either: I don't even have a cell phone. However, why would you expect reliability from a medium marketed for teenyboppers to use to exchange insults and love notes?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I own an sms-enabled phone and each time I send it beeps at the other end. At least almost the way.
What a relief..
I guess thats why my grandma kept acting normal after I accidentally sent her a message instead of my gf saying I want to make sweet sweet love to her all night long.
I don't have SMS???? - Is this a common thing for US networks, just here in UK it's given that everyone with a mobile phone (around 60pc last at last count IIRC) have SMS
Funny actually, I'm on T-Mobile now, and have been with them since they were VoiceStream and have never lost a message between myself and the friends I SMS on a consistent basis. Naturally then, I'm surprised to see T-Mobile considered the worst of the bunch.
Now getting our MEANINGS across to one another is quite a different manner... =)
There is no sig...
... the family used to use SMS for text conversations all the time, my sisters and parents still do. It seems to be a cheap effective way to communicate. Here in the US the networks seem to have done a terrible job of implementation... text messages rarely seem to reach their destination over the same carrier, let alone inter-carrier... I've stopped using them, this report does not come as much of a surprise. GSM is still a pretty new technology to the US, I guess we give it time and they'll get it sorted out. Service was pretty grim in the UK in the early days as well.
In Norway, I have never lost a message, allthough, a couple of years ago, two messages I sent arrived fairly late (i.e., a couple of hours later).
The telco might be dropping out a message here and there to make a few extra bucks on messages.
Here's the math. If 7.5% of 26,000 messages don't make it through, that what..1950 messages that MAY get repeated. So at $0.10 per message and at a resend rate of 20% (390 resent messages) They make an extra $40.
Double the amount of messages and increase the failure rate to 10% and a constant resend rate of 20%, thats $104.
So if a telco runs an SMS service that does some 150,000 messages a day and drops out, maybe 12% of them betting on a %20 resend rate...thats adds up over time.
Hades, PoD: Official Advocate
two-week, 26,000 message test-period
What they forgot to mention was the fact that all these messages were sent to the same guy's phone by one REALLY pissed off girlfriend. If the exploding phone didn't kill him, the bill he's gonna get certainly will.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
What puzzles me is that anyone cares whether SMS messages arrive or not. Most of us have voice mail on our phones? Why does anyone want to turn their cell phone into the electronic equivalent of a doggy leash?
It's bad enough when you have to carry a pager for work; voluntarily subjecting yourself to that kind of intrusion strikes me as nuts.
In addition, dishonest marketers and at least some cell service providers are using SMS to send unwanted bulk marketing messages -- that is, they are spamming users. :/
AT&T, my cell phone service provider, is apparently one of those. After I read complaints from a number of AT&T users who had been SMS-spammed and who said that AT&T refused to stop, I demanded that AT&T disable all "services" on my cell phone account that I had not specifically authorized, including SMS. The representative tried to claim that they couldn't do that, but I insisted and he eventually gave in.
Don't assume that each new "feature" offered by your cell phone provider (or your ISP) is something you want.
Catherine
To write "hello" I press 43556. much easier :)
Most modern phones has this system, and works by using a dictionary (which you update every time you miss).
try sprint. you have to access a website just to access sms. Its the worst system ever dreamed!
I have only had once instance of this unreliability that lead to anything negative (?) happening. This girl swore up and down I was ignoring her when she finally got me on the phone but I KNOW that message never made it through. Never mind that I was ignoring all her calls..you know how it is when you have all those girls calling and you just dont have the time for ALL of them....
(humor folks, enjoy...)
I'm aware of a few of my messages not reaching their destinations, but that's the important ones where I follow up with a call a few hours later saying 'So? Did you get my text? -are- we on for tonight?' I'd guess more trivial ones than that actually disappear.
*shrug* I'd not consign anything that important to SMS anyway, and it annoys me more when SMSs take five or six hours to get through, which seems to happen all the time...
I sent you a text message about this.
You pay around 10 cents per the service. If the message fails, you still pay it.
I'm makin dis post on me phon right now. u'd be surprizd how massages get mangled in tranzit. Noe wot I mean? LOL
How is this at all surprising? SMS does not guarantee timely delivery nor does it guarantee delivery at all - since when did the GSM specification say SMS will guarantee most of your messages will be delivered? SMS is delivering exactly what it promised to deliver - a stop-gap text messaging system in time for GSM Phase 2; certainly it's poorly design and they probably could have done better in the time allotted, but I think that's a moot point given that GPRS has fairly wide deployment and there are quite a few alternatives to SMS available... mainly being e-mail over a guaranteed delivery transport.
If you want to know more about SMS, you can find out from the ETSI GTS GSM 07.05 specifications (or GSM Suplimentary Services 07.05).
I didn't even know that you could network a Sega Master System. Does it use the card slot or the cartridge port?
Newsflash! Picture phones are low-quality!
I find that in New Zealand, all the messages get through. Some times it might take a few hours, but it always works.
That's neat. You could use SMS to tell off your boss, and actually have 7.5% percent chance of keeping your job. =) Hey, it's better than nothing!
...oOOo..'(_)'..oOOo...
While this doesn't account for more than a few messages per day, I have yet to not receive one. Never used SMS prior to this, now I am in love (of course e-mail to my phone works just as well).
Over the past 5 years I have spent quite a bit of time overseas and I've used SMS as primary method of communication to my friends and family.
When I was in Hong Kong I *rarely* had a problem with loosing an SMS message. Sometimes where would be a bit of a delay, but it was never more than a couple of hours. Usually it felt like it was instantaneous. Most of my messages were going between HK (Orange, HKT) and Canada (Fido).
I had similar experiences in the UK and the US, but admittedly, I wasn't in those places for as long as I was in HK (days vs. months).
In Canada, however, I've been having a completely different experience. SMS between Canadian carriers is horrible. I am now with Rogers AT&T (GSM) and quite a few of the messages I send to Fido (GSM) or Telus (CDMA) customers get dropped or massively delayed. The same seems to happen when they send me messages, as well.
I suspect the problems within Canada are because of the third party SMS gateway that is involved. Because of the different networks and technologies the Canadian carriers have contract to a third party to handle the SMS gatewaying between networks. Even between Rogers and Fido (which are both GSM) seem to use this gateway.
I don't usually have too many issues if I only send messages within my carrier, though.
I don't have SMS
Wow. Is this normal in the US? Over here everybody between 13 and 30 have mobile phones with sms. You can get phones with cash cards for $10 in every gas station, supermarket etc. I didn't really need a mobile phone, but without one you're cut off from a lot off action.
When it comes to reliability, I can't ever remember sending an sms that didn't get through, but when the traffic is very high (like on new years eve), messages can be delayed up to twelve hours.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
...has reached it's destination. That's 100% of the messages I read. ;)
I've had a few SMSes not reaching their destination in the past.
Others *have* reached the destination, but much later than expected. I had one a few weeks ago that took a day to arrive! This is with a good signal on both sides (we ended up using voice, which is of course nice and predictable. Either it works or it doesn't.)
It's helpful to have message delivery confirmation switched on, which is an option in the messaging settings of most phones. This will tell you if/when the message arrives.
Of course, I've also had (and managed to prove) late message delivery confirmations!!
Sometimes it's even worse that that.
Have a tried a couple of times, getting a call from a client that didn't understand that I didn't call back after he left a message on the answer machine.
The problem was that the SMS that tells me that there is a message waiting never reached my phone. It is even worse those times when I am on 24/7 standby. When I have a unanswered call, I just used to check if there was a SMS from the answering service. But since I can't rely on the SMS service I now check the answering machine everytime I have an unanswered call on the phone.
my sig
...maybe it's the $70+ fine per spam that does it (or the legal threat of that at least), but I've never recieved a single SPAM in Norway.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Quick paste:
Verizon Wireless emerged the victor from what could be one of the country's first cases of wireless spamming.
The country's largest wireless carrier, based in Bedminster, N.J., said it had reached a settlement with Acacia National Mortgage, which calls for the lender to stop sending repeated, unsolicited commercial text messages to Verizon Wireless customers.
Other terms of the settlement were not disclosed, including any possible remuneration for message recipients, who under some plans are charged a per-message fee. Under the Colorado state antispam law on which Verizon based its case, recipients or carriers can sue for $10 per message, plus any actual damages.
Full article is here
I love Verizon Wireless.
THIS FIRST POST SENT VIA SMS. NO PROBLEM, AS YOU ALL CAN SEE.
blahblahblahLameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like SMSing.
Help savingAmigaOS and a free PowerPC market
So what do you do with this wonderful invention? Well, a system called SMS is bolted on for unreliably sending very short messages that take an age to type in. For the luxury of sending (or not; who knows?) this uselessly small piece of information, you are prepared to pay the same price as a about a minute's worth of full voice communication. That's roughly the same amount of time it took to type in your four-word question in the first place.
Oh, and everybody that sends these messages uses a basterdised version of 1337 speak, which is actually considered to be quite cool.
Man, I hate mobile phones.
SMS is like the instant messanging of the cell phone world. Who cares if >10% of the messages don't get through. I'd bet the aim/icq/msn/etc networks have similar if not worse reliability. If you really want to get ahold of someone, you call them.
this might sound stupid and all...
but im glad that there is a failure rate.
I dont use SMS messages, i dont quite see the point.
my phone supports AIM, if i need to, i just use that.
additionally, SMS will become the next hottest spam source.
Last nite, i finally got another cell phone, through verizon...
the phone hadnt been activated for 2 hours, and i received some mail that had been sent from hotmail, advertising a party...
2 hours!
yea, its a cool little feature, but i dont see how it can be anything trully beneficial, just another gee-wiz thing.
esp when im about to start getting charged for all the spam that comes in to the phone.
Stop over-analyzing your analizations
Try dropped cell phone calls. Can someone do a study on that? Much more useful than SMS.
Does anyone have any links to comparable stats on other services (eg email on iMode in Japan) ? I heard once that NTT Docomo's iMode mail server gets 800 million messages a day, of which only 200 million are legitimate addresses. Under that kind of load, 7.5% lost messages would be a good figure ... in my experience I lose around 10% of messages each day. That's not really lose though, cause it's just that they arrive a week after I send them. The joy of spam ....
R
Servlet v2.4 container in a single 161KB jar file ? Try Winstone
Just curious since I don't know how sms works under the cover, but maybe it's like TCP/UDP. Voice ( TCP ) will always have priority over SMS(UDP) and when traffic is high ( number of calls ), the SMS messages get dropped... just a thought.
over the 3 years or so ive SMS'd heh hardly ever have I experienced sms's that hasnt gotten to where they were supposed to.. the only times it has happened has been at special occasions like a few hours before and after newyears when theres extreme amounts of traffic..or when theres been any net problems wich has happened like twice so.. id say its more like 0.010% that get lost.. prolly less.. but it ofcourse depends on the operators and the coverage and their capacity..
Vodafone's GSM network always tells me when a message can't be delivered (wrong number entered on my part usually - not a cellphone) and I don't think I've ever had someone (reliably)say "Oh I didn't get that text message"... plenty of no-hopers that can't actually use their phones claiming not to get messages (I usually find them and show them how to use their SMS or predictive texting at that point).
Telecom NZ uses CDMA an D-AMPS and I haven't heard of any losses on that side at all.
I am a leaf on the wind
The second type they have is the "PCS Short Mail Message". This is the one that claims compatibility with non-sprint customers, and is presumably the SMS message. I've probably had 20% of these dropped as I was testing. Now the real problem is that on my phone (Treo 300) you cannot read these messages, you need to click on the URL which sends you to the sprintpcs page, from which you must log in and read the message. This is annoying enough as it is, but the real problem is the fact that the sprintpcs page, for whatever reason, doesn't render on the phone itself. Sure, it works in Mozilla, but the point is to have them at your fingertips, not your desktop.
Sprint has a free web page where you can send the "One Way Messages" so it doesn't cost a thing. It doesn't even require cookies or anything, so you could even automate it with a brain dead shell script.
I wanted to have a simple indication when I get new emails when I'm out and about, so I set up a procmail rule that pipes a copy of certain emails to a program email2pager. This program determines if it should send a message (time of day, if I'm active on the mail server, etc) and then scans the email for the Subject and From, then goes and grabs the first bit of the message (stripping MIME headers, "So and so said", commented text, remember, 160 characters max) and then sends it to a second perl script (misnamed sms-sprint) which uses LWP to connect to the Sprint page and send the message.
It works without sending the whole message to Sprint. Anything that is sensitive should have been sent with PGP, of course.
If anyone is interested in the scripts, let me know.
Could somebody please explain why somebody would willingly squint at a tiny screen, and peck at a tiny keyboard to type out some message, reminiscent of the days of the telegraph, instead of just dialing the same damn phone and, god forbid, actually *speak* to someone? I have no idea how much "SMS" costs, and I really can't be bothered to go from virtually free voice calls (after the monthly fee) to hunting and pecking lines of text on the phone.
In my experience, the reliability of SMS depends a lot on the provider. I have had no problems with AT&T, Cingular or Voicestream, and I have not experienced any loss when sending between phones on these networks.
The biggest problem, however, is when I send messages to Europe. For months at a time, it will work fine with a certain provider, and then no messages will go through. Sometimes the problem is only one-way. It depends on which provider I send from here to which provider I send to in Europe.
Bottom line: I've had no problem sending nationally, but messages crossing the Atlantic sometimes get lost.
Sprint has been delivering voicemails late more and more frequently. This is extra bad since it's a business plan. We've had voicemails up to two weeks late. They'll suddenly come through 9 at a time.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
USA sluggishly lagging behind Europe? Impossible. I bet that guys who tested it just misstyped the numbers or the user on the other end didn't turn the phone on - AFAIK that's the most common reason for lost messages.
"Two beers or not two beers. That's the question." -- Shakesbeer
I roughly estimate the ratio of SMS that actually reach people I sent (or vice versa) around 95% to 98%, once in a while one doesn't come through. However, during Xmas time or New Year,when many people seem to SMS a lot, or during big events when people tend to SMS their beloved a lot, many SMS's get lost or get delayed, sometimes for even days!
OTOH, I saw virtually 90% loss of SMS with some providers when directly sending SMS using a modem from a computer accessing their SMS gateways with tools like smsclient rather then using a cell phone (not with all providers). This was a major annoyance when I used this feature as admin alert during network outage times... Either you got three clones of the same SMS, or you received none...Ouch. I don't have SMS
Mmhhh.. Who owns a cell phone and does not SMS? And if you don't own one, what would one care anyway...?
(BTW, said things are based on SMS experience in Europe, Germany in particular...)
I've seen failure rates of 75% on the modem gateway that my local phone carrier uses for my pager(Bell Canada). As well, sometimes a page will take 5-6 hours to go through.
Yet if you dial my pager number, the pages always go through, although sometimes delayed up to 10 minutes.
I am using SMS to relay this message and
ya, here's a warning to you all
had a friend SMS me when she landed so i knew when to leave and pick her up. got a call a few hours later "where are you?"
"....no you didnt"
"yes i did!"
etc etc
so she waits in the airport for 2 hours, and halfway home I get an SMS.
"leave now"
doh
Here is a good site with a wealth of technical information on how SMS works behind the scenes.
I've used both AT&T Wireless and Nextel, specifically for work applications. We have a system that send e-mails to the phones e-mail address when something goes down or comes back up. I consistently with both services have lost messages. Or worse, the messages are severly delayed.
"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps." ~ Emo Phillips
Having not used SMS, I don't know if this is the same thing. We use the text messaging features of our phone/pagers at work all the time for automated systems to alert us to system problems. We've had days where things come in very late, sometimes by many hours.
Unfortunately, we never negotiated an SLA with Verizon, so if their system has problems oh well, too bad.
IMHO, late messages are as bad as ones that never get delivered. How about numbers on that?
My sister and I have exchanged ~100-200 messages via SMS (voicestream aka t-mobile), as close as 20 feet and as far as 1600 miles, and I haven't experienced a lost message. Additionally, I've exchanged SMS messages with people on other providers (cingular mostly) with no loss.
I send emails via SMS and havent lost any of those either.
It seems that the report just says that the US carriers are shoddy, while all our European and Oceanic ./ ers say they have no problems with SMS.
Should this come as a surprise ? Maybe its time the US carriers realised that the reason people there don't uses SMS is because it's broken and needs to be fixed.
Oh Come on moderator fuckwits...: it goes like this>
It was funny, It ceased to be funny, it's now funny again, but only with the correct irony.
Now this post *is* funny, either with or without the irony if that is too much for you.
Is this report consistent with your experience?
:)
Well for what it's worth,
1. International (roaming) messaging is a disaster. You're lucky if anything arrives, and if it does, it can easily be delayed a few days. Once it gets through, you're likely to get the message several times - people reported up to seven times. Can you say ACK ?
2. During peak loads, it looks like the (Belgian) operators give priority to packets originating from subscribers -- ie people who are not using a GSM-version of a calling card containing n minutes / m messages. This was especially obvious at new years' eve -- everyone I know with a subscription got through with every single SMS; people with a card got exactly zero messages through the stampede. If delivery fails, you get a notice though, and afaik you're not billed.
There are alot of people saying 'i hate mobile phones' 'why would you want to sms' 'tiny screen, small message' etc. etc. ;) )
/. types) - set up with an email to sms gateway, you can be informed of any problems quickly
Those people abviously havent used sms. I live in the UK, where it is cheap and reliable. I dont think I had a message fail (unless it was in my favour
Despite the limitations, its useful for loads of things:/
discreet messages - where someone cant speak right now
addresses, phone numbers - text them and save them and you wont lose it!
server monitoring (for the
and loads more - I get notified of my new email by SMS!
Just my 2p.
at least in germany. If your not using web-
frontends.
Or get a phone that supports it. Sheesh.
Yay me!
I think the group that should be most alarmed by this study are High School students who have been known to use the text messaging features of their phones to send test answers to each other.
Of course if they had studied they wouldn't need to be texting in the first place....
The world called out for a hero and all it got was me...
I refuse to carry more than one device, and there are uses for text pages.
My servers can't call me to tell me they're down, so the phone/voxmail argument is invalid.
I really like getting the gate and time changes sent to my phone when I fly. However, these have been my experiences:
- The message never shows up.
- The message tells me what gate I should be at when I'm already sitting on the plane.
- The message tells me what time I'm leaving after I've arrived.
- 3 messages arrive in 5 minutes, so I don't know which one to trust.
I did some work on a site selling ringtones once, and those things would always disappear in the air. Seemed more like a 15% failure rate to me...
-Wembley
Share and Enjoy!
I've been sending sms's for about 5-6 years here in israel (at least 5 a day.)and i can say that 100% of the messages have reached their destination. (sending and receiving) Sometimes it wont send the message becuase of network problems or something but i've never recived a "message sent" and not had the message arrive to it's destination.
BeNJ
On T-Mobile, messages seem to increasingly return an error when sent, generating "message not sent" on a Nokia phone. On my Motorola V70 though, when that happens it just keeps trying to send it, and then beeps with a little note when it finally goes through.
As far I can tell, EVERY of SMS messages through. I've had a friend tell he or she didn't get message. this whole article be big joke, I.
fact, I'm a new type of SMSweb to post comment slashdot! As can see, problems.
In my country (Greece), SMS messages never get lost. Even in peak hours you get your message right away in a subsecond.
Actually, mobile users in Greece use SMS messages more often to communicate that actually making a call. The phone companies also know this and make much more money from SMS that calls. The also have special offers for sending SMS messages cheaply while the call costs are very expensive (and it is very popular).
In this new year's eve (the time when the network has the highest traffic) 50 million SMS messages were sent in 15 minutes (for the population of Greece that is about 5 SMS messages per citizen)!
Here is Australia, our main problem is delivery time. This is one of the major reasons why pager (beeprs) are still in use. I work for the State Emergency service, and we have to use pagers. Sometime, an SMS message takes up to 4 hours. They have to do something about that.
SMS was bought by Siemens years ago.
Well I live in the Netherlands and havent lost a singe sms ever. Sure at really peak ours they can get there a bit later, but thats not too bad.. (had that at 1/1/2003 0:45)
http://www.virtualconcepts.nl/
We have three main mobile service providers in Australia: Telstra, which is still (just) majority govt-owned, and Optus and Vodaphone which are private.
Optus is woefully unreliable - their entire network died on New Year's Eve, and SMSes between Optus phones and non-Optus phones can take 12 or 24 hours to arrive.
Telstra has the best coverage and the most reliable service, even tho (or because?) it's a Microsoftian semi-monopoly. Optus is shit. About Vodaphone, I have no opinion...
I have discovered a truly remarkable
I'm from Belgium and for as far as I can remember, I've never lost an SMS.
I have my cellphone set that for every SMS I send out, I'll get a report on it's status. 'Pending' if it hasn't arrived, 'Recieved' if it has.
90% of the time, they arrive instantly. Delay's are usually attributed to the recieving end because his/her cellphone has been switched off, battery died or their SMS box is full.
Except for things that need urgent attention, I find SMS to be very reliable. More reliable then email if you ask me. Email has the tendancy to subject itself to Murphy's Law everytime anything important has to be sent out or is expected.
With the mass popularity of SMS in Europe most carriers have had to invest in keeping up with the demand in sending messages. I wouldn't be surprised if they made more money with SMS then through regular phone calls. People rarely make any phone calls anymore.
And since there is a cost with every SMS sent, it still remains spam free.
Pretty much all of the messages I send get through, actually I can't think of a time when one hasn't. On most phones, theres an option to request a delivery report, where you get a message back saying when the other user has recevied the message. It works pretty well, to the point that if the person has their phone switched off, you only get the message when they switch their phone on and actually receive the message. Not sure if its available on all networks, but it works fine on vodafone UK, even when sending cross-network.
...of Slashdot stories seem to be duplicates, but the vast majority of us don't really seem to care.
We just click "reload" and wait for new stuff.
Otherwise, I really haven't had any problems with SMS. I've got AT&T Wireless (GSM/GPRS service) and I think only twice have I had messages show up more than 10 minutes later.
I have Nagios set to send me SMS messages if something goes down, and I always get them right away.
You gotta love the SMS-stories on slashdot. All the Europeans go "What are you talking about? It works great, I use it all the time!" and all the Americans go "SMS, why would you want to use that?"
I haven't had any problems with SMS except for the predictably busy periods (New Years, et al.) -where I'll receive the "Network busy" message until it clears up.
I like to get alerts on my cell phone for weather and news, so I signed up for the services on Yahoo. At first I didn't want to reveal my phone number, so I used a forwarding email service. All I ever got was the occasional (about once a month) weather messege from yahoo and a newsletter from the forwarding service.
With the miserable rate, I added my original number/email address to the service and subscribed to all the same alerts. I was getting all my weather every morning for the first week or two, but now I only get weather once a week and I never get news updates.
There is a reason I always have to ask my friends if they got my SMS
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
My GF and I trade SMS' all the time, as they're easy to use when I'm DJ'ing or either of us are in class. Anyway, I don't think Verizon Wireless has ever dropped a message between us, though I get dupes occasionally.
http://www.somethingpositive.net Funny + bitter = comedy gold
I'm sure all the messages sent to me from Natilie Portman requesting a beowolf cluster of hot grits served from a troll reading repeat stories on slashdot while his grandmother compiles the linux kernel from a ballon using leet wares she got from CowboyNeal have been lost... ;)
winky added for the humor impaired.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
general public email delivery rate.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
1. I'll take it you've never heard of T9. Any halfwit could manage 10 WPM or so easily. You need to press each key only once, and it guesses what you're typing. Very effectively. Any you can type in perfect english (or whatever language you use..) no need to use "1337"
2. Receiving an SMS is far less intrusive than receiving a phone call. So you don't need to think twice before messaging someone about something totally trivial. Its a great way to stay in touch with people.
3. My provider offered the same rate for messages globally...equivalent to $0.02 US... which works out quite a bit cheaper than an international call.
On my old phone (Here in England) I was on Vodafone and virtually all my msgs that were sent got to there destinations, however I had a friend on BTcellnet (now O2) that would very rarely get my msgs (maybe 1 out of every 10) and her messages would virtually never get to me (I believe it was about 1 out of every 20!) but since then ive switched to Orange and everything that is sent is recieved eventually. Maquis196
I am very surprised that so many slashdot readers are anti-sms. I wonder how many of these same people get all excited about pervasive computing, wifi connected handhelds and the like? Is there much difference? Really?
These people appear to be missing the appeal of SMS to most people: It's cheap, you've always got your phone with you and you can do other stuff while communicating (listen to music, watch a movie, read a book). SMS is an inexpensive method of non-critical communication. This is/was especially important when prepaid phone services became available, as the call costs were expensive per second, but SMS had a flat rate.
In short, SMS has/had a much better _percieved_value_ than voice calls.
What I really like is the ability to purchase stuff using SMS like Coke or even your parking!
BTW the popularity of prepaid phone and SMS was never predicted by some of the Telcos, especially not here in .au. A Whole Other Story if anyone cares.
"The big question in our lives is how to be at the same time a hedonist and in a hurry" - Alain Ducasse (?)
I've used SMS here in Sweden for a couple of years, I think it's almost 8 years, and the number of times it has failed can be counted on one hand...
Some background info first: I'm using an Optus prepaid phone here in Australia. The lack of a contract and upkeep fees means that call airtime is very pricey (A$1/minute) compared to an SMS (A30c/message). Optus users also pay to receive their voicemail (A50c/minute), whereas receiving an SMS is free. I'll go out on a limb here and say that more people here have a mobile phone than regular internet access, and as a result SMS is a hugely popular form of communication. ICQ supporting SMS has been wonderful, because sending from it is free! :)
I probably send and/or receive 3-4 messages on any given day. Very, very occasionally my phone or ICQ will say the message was not delivered, and resending it usually works (unless I've run out of credit on my phone). At about the same rate of incidence is messages taking up to two days to arrive, either being sent or received by me. Much rarer are the times where the messages just disappear into the ether... I'd say that's probably happened two or three times since I've had a mobile (about four years). So it's not all that flaky... if something is critical, I'll call rather than message, but for the most part it's a very efficient way of communicating on the run.
For people ripping on the spelling and typing difficulty of SMS... a good majority of people here use Nokia phones. The 3210 and above have a weird SMS typing function that uses single keypresses and an internal dictionary to figure out what words you want, making writing a message in plain English much easier than using BS leetspeak. (Sure, you can turn off that function at will and leet away, but people like that would write their assignments or tax return in leet if they could...) I think the bad-spelling-in-SMS thing has been perpetuated by marketers who put together phone promos and competitions and try to look 'cool' by using shitty shorthand.
I send a lot of SMS messages in Australia, and when a message fails to arrive at the intended destination, it is usually because I was too drunk and sent it to the wrong person. Can be very bad sometimes... 8-/
I would guesstimate that only a very small handful of the thousands of messages I have sent were not delivered and that usually due to network failures. (ie, overloaded networks on New Years Eve)
Mmm... I've had phones on both Optus and Telstra, and never had an SMS fail on me...
7 odd percent is a crazy high failure rate... I don't think I'd use it if it was that high here...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
I have a t68 world and a t28 world. the t68 is for my cingular wireless here in the states. Every third sms croaks with this service, while my Slovenia phone co, Mobitel, can get every sms to me when I cut on my t28 in the States, or anywhere for that matter. I think it really has to do with the provider and the importance that they put on sms. Cingular charges 3 bucks for 100 sms's a month, while Mobitel charges nothing and only 1 tolar a minute for phone calls within SLO and 55 tolars a minute for international roaming for my Cingular phone. Cingular charges 400 tolars a minute (2 bucks, roughly) for a minute to my Mobitel phone. US GSM and mobile phone plans in general are a ripoff. How can Slovenia, while pretty prosperous for a former Yugoslav republic, keep rates so cheap? It can just be 90 percent market penetration alone!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Hello from Australia!
I was involved in programming some SMS-based apps for a telecommunications company.
Within Australia, SMS delivery is virtually gauranteed - except for two caveats:
* Phone companies are not actually bound by govt service gaurantee to deliver SMS (yet), so in theory - if they became overloaded - they can legally drop messages. In practice, this almost never happens.
* They do sign service agreement contracts with each other, and resellers, which do gaurantee delivery of messages, but with no time limit. So, in theory (and in practice) messages can take as short as 8-16 seconds for delivery, but up to 48 hours for final delivery (This happens more often than you'd think).
The emergency services made an enquiry to us regarding using SMS for the Australian emergency service for deaf people (ie deaf people could SMS the Australian emergency telephone number - 000), but after they investigated further they decided that due to potential time delays involved it would be too dangerous.
It's typical to have time delays in the following scenarios:
* This year on Christmas Day some networks were so overloaded that messages took as long as 8 hours to arrive to their destination.
* In crowded areas such as the Sydney CBD on New Years Eve, SMS messages can not be sent reliably, or when they are sent, the delivery back into the CBD can take hours - not seconds.
* If someone drops hundreds of thousands of messages onto one of the SMSCs at once, SMS performance across some or all carriers can be impacted significantly.
Presumably, this is more an issue of network capacity (which is limited in GSM) rather than any other issue. SMS is a very heavy protocol for the sending of 160 character messages. If we are to increase reliability and capacity of messaging services under GSM (so called 2.5G), the SMS standard needs to be replaced with a more efficient standard.
Enjoy!
You got a chuckle out of me... but arent they Wops, not Waps?
I worked for a company from 98-00 that used Nextel everything. The text messages took ten minutes to get through and it was very common for people to call my number (antenna showing four bars)and be told I was off the network. They'd leave voice mail and 45 minutes to 1.5 hour later, the phone would notify me about it. Crap, crap, crap. Crap coverage, dropped calls. The "handy-talky" function worked, fortunately, so we could actually communicate in the field.
... in five years of using a GSM phone. Not one. I don't know if the GSM networks in the US are particularly flakey, though. In the UK and Europe they work very well. What does happen is that they can be delayed for as much as 30 minutes when the network is insanely busy (Christmas, or New Year at midnight).
On the Ericsson T68 line, you can turn on delivery reports under the SMS -> Options menu. It will tell you if the remote phone received the message or not. About 1 out of 20 I send don't make it (and get no report), and I have to resend.
I've heard that on a friday or saturday night in the UK, up to 60% of SMS's go undelivered. Everyone is out at the loud bars and SMS'ing their friends to find out where they are at.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Just thought I'd mention this since I discovered it recently, and I think it's pretty sweet =)
Here's the page for Wireless AIM, using SMS or WAP or some other company-specific messaging services. Most plans have free incoming messages, so this is an easy way for people to send you messages (MSN, Yahoo, and ICQ have similar features.)
-Berj
I don't think SMS is just some additional feature, I find it is one of the main reasons why mobile phones are so useful. I know many people here in Switzerland who use their mobile phones at least as often for writing and reading SMS messages as for telephoning.
There are many advantages - in many situations, it would not be possible to answer phone calls, e.g. in libraries, at lectures, during conferences etc., but it is possible to receive SMS messages, when the phone is set to vibrate rather than to ring, it doesn't disturb anyone, you can send someone a telephone number or an e-mail address and with most modern phones, they can be used directly from the phone. It is much easier to reach someone who is busy because asynchronous communication is possible. SMS is also used as a kind of chat system, and I use it for e-mail notifications, I find it very convenient that I don't have to be at a computer to know about e-mails sent to me. For these e-mail notifications, it's good to have good filtering in order not to receive too many of them for spam. I have, however, hardly ever received spam directly by SMS (maybe 2 or 3 spam SMS in the last years) - there were some incidents of SMS spamming in Switzerland, too, but SMS seems to be much easier to control than e-mail, and the telephone companies are very strict on that matter.
I don't think I have ever experienced SMS messages getting lost, and there were times when I used SMS very much (that could get quite expensive). Until about two years ago, there were sometimes delays of more than an hour at peak times like New Year's Eve when everyone sends around greetings, but now that seems to be over. This time, on New Year and New Year's Eve, 58 millions of SMS messages were sent in Switzerland without problem - this also shows how popular the service is (the country only has about 7 millions inhabitants).
7.5% seems highly unreliable and not in keeping with TCAP, which is the protocol ontop of which SMS is build. SMS or MAP, Which is "Messaging Application Part", built ontop of "Transaction Capability Application Part" are high level SS7 protocols which are meant to be reliable. One of the probable reasons it might not be would be the Messaging Center, SMSC! These are notably shite, with both Logica and CMG, which is now Logica, basically selling very expensive shite. However the exponential backoff algorithm on delivery is fairly long, and it could be the case that an SMS is received a long time after it was sent, though what has often happened is that an SMSC gets overloaded, and the admins reboot it... and pop go all the messages. I do believe that the posting refers to the states, because in Europe it's just dandy. That would be down to operators experience with SMSC's, Gateway MSCs "ie connections between differing cellulare networks", links, number portability etc... SS7 is fairly baroque!
Cheers!
Kahunga the Behemoth.
id say 10% failure with a netowrk monitoring system sending sms through sprints network here in the southeast
It doesn't look like Sprint charges me extra for the duplicates, so it doesn't bother me too terribly much, though I'd prefer it if my phone would just suppress the dupes altogether rather than showing them with "Duplicate!" warnings.
Heck, I'd settle for slashdot editors supressing dupes rather than reading all the "Duplicate!" comments, but the failure rate on that kind of system is awful.
c'mon people, everyone whining about how useless it is prolly lives in North America. I lived in Canada til I was 25, where the mobile technology is crap, I never felt the need for one til I moved to New Zealand.
I felt like I left the stone age and entered the 21st century.
SMS messages here are pretty much 1/5 as expensive as calling(guesstimate,when considering per minute calls), and that builds up when you are constantly calling all over the country, or especially if calling overseas to Europe.
By the way in NZ you can call anywhere in the country here for the same price, because the phones aren't region (area code) specific, amazing hey!. And it isnt that much to call overseas either as they are on the same GSM technology, but its cheaper to 'text'(slang)
When you can quickly leave a quick reminder, or tell someone you'll be late, or arrange a meeting, or send an address, or share a cricket score to anyone, anywhere anytime, It is useful. And there is a learning curve to typing on them, but most New Zealanders peck out huge messges with both thumbs very quickly. I was amazed by it when I first moved here, as it took me 10 minutes to reply with "OK". And there is an sms nuspeak, like
"mt u thr @ 3".
Besides how often does a regular "voice call" crap out anyway. Lets see the stats on that.
>And i use a SMS chat system where I receive around 100 messages per day...
auch! expensvie! (?) >_;;
sms cost about $.2 for me.
About 1% fails, always get a notification if it fails.
Hey! That's my sig you're smoking there!
I'd bet they're praying for a 92.5% success rate right about now...
From their about page:
The "Orange" brand is licensed to Hutchison Telecommunications (Australia) Limited. Find out more about Hutchison at www.hutchison.com.au.
I'm seeing a lot of "Why the hell would someone use a cell phone to message when they can just talk?!?"
Well, besides the giggle factor that comes into play the first time you message a friend who's staring at you from right across the room, my answer would be because IT QUIET!!!
In the movie theater and your mom/boss/significant other wants to know where you are, or why the hell you aren't someplace you're supposed to be? Your phone on vibrate can show you who's calling you, and you can quickly type in a message and reply back with information without disturbing those around you.
On New Years Eve, I was at a Rave at the LA Sports Arena. Do you think I'll really be able to hear or talk to anybody next to a wall of subs blowing out my ear drums? Considering there were quite a few people there, I also get separated from my friends. Where's my buddies? When do I know when it's time to go? How far is Kenny getting with that Bree chick (seriously!)? There would be no way we could talk on our phones, but we were still able to communicate with our SMS text messages.
Now granted, SMS isn't nessecary, but then again, this is Slashdot. How often do we do things that are truely nessecary?
-Kefabi
In Australia, using Orange's CDMA service (which I understand is sublet from Telstra, I could be wrong, have been often before), most of my SMS messages do seem to get through... But... about 1% don't get through. And about 19% take more than a day to get through. At this rate it's almost cheaper to buy a postage stamp for 20% of the messages. ;-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
yep, "licensed to" by France Telecom. Hutchinson set up Orange, sold it for a great fortune, and is now investing that fortune is 3G networks. Smart company.
That was classic intercourse!
I said I received them, I don't send them. I don't pay for receiving messages (neither for sending them, but that's another story).
Some of the users in the chat room are in the 20 top SMS senders in the country for our operator (we had access to the statistic reports). They can reply to most SMSs in less then 15 seconds using T9! Really...
Of course I stop paying attention for the phone for some time it end up being full.
Not to sound like a broken record.. but.. Europe.
SMS is popular because a) it works EVERYWHERE, right across the continent, across basically all carriers.
b) fixed per-message fee. pennies. Sounds like a lot? Compare it to calling someone to say "buy milk" or "meet you at 6" and it's a lot cheaper.
Remember, in the REST of the world you often don't sign contracts, or get tons of free minutes a month.. you simply pay for the calls and data you originate. Period. You do not pay for incoming.
When I was in Ireland, I saw that SMS was *extremely* popular. People bang out messages to each other all the time. Sounds goofy to you? It's quite handy.
SMS is efficent, and doesn't demand attention for little notes.
We in North America tend to view SMS more as an alphanumeric paging thingy than a real 2 way communication device... and the reason is, it only works with some of the phones we know.
In europe, if I got your cel number, I can send you a message... I don't have to wonder what carrier you are on.
From what I experienced with AT&T, I get about a 1 in 4 failure rate. Although I would assume they have a limited period of time they're willing to hold the message if the message cannot be delivered. As such I don't rely on SMS for anything important. I would use wireless E-mail access if it is of ANY importance whatsoever.
I've noticed very long delays on my AT&T Wireless phone when recieving e-mails / text messages. The other day I sent some test e-mails and got a few of them almost 2 hours later. No idea if any messages are getting lost though.
Rochester, NY
Verizon Wireless
Avg SMS transfer time of 2 hours
1/10 don't make it.
http://www.askthevoid.com
I would have to say that all around, their network is not good. They oversubscribed, and thus oversaturated the airwaves, especially in dense urban areas. Their customer service is downright belligerent -- Sprint recently dropped a FEE for talking to customer service, for goodness' sake.
I experimented with their SMS service -- a few messages sent that never reached their destinations. Maybe it was just a bad day -- but I suspect that the company is absolute trash.
Yeah, cellphones started with kids, not with yuppies and corporations with money to spend. It is the massive influx of business cash that allowed the phones to be minaturized and stylized for teens to want in the first place.
I don't want to sound harsh but the only things going for that post are the 2 exclamation marks in italic.
I guess I could put a underrated mod. Or post this essential comment.
Guess which one I picked.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
I've sent two SMS messages to myself. The first one I received over 17 times. My delivery rate is therefore 1800%, which is considerably better than 92.5%. :D
SMS meaasge loses YOU !!!
Can I bum a sig? I left mine at the office.
Particularly when crossing Vodafone/Optus networks . I used to have "message confirmation" turned on but Vodafone decided to start charging me extra for that last year so I had to turn it off.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
AT&T to Cingular? Fine every time.
Cingular to Cingular? Yup, works.
Cingular to AT&T? You're screwed.
The chick at the AT&T phone store said that we would need to do it in terms of e-mail - that is, have the Cingular phone "send e-mail" to get to the AT&T phone.
So, she wants people to send SMS to get to SMTP to get to another SMTP server to get back to SMS. What the hell is that?
They may be trading using a brand name owned by France Telecom but that doesn't change the fact that if you are using Orange in Australia then it's H.T. that's running the show.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
When SMS was first introduced here it was not unusual for messages to take hours to be sent or to fail alltogether. I started making use of the automated receipt system that will tell you when the other person has recieved your message.
The quality of service has improved hugely in recent years so that 95% of messages are now delivered within seconds, and very few are lost at all.
Unfortunatly the automated recieipts are now a charged service so I have disabled them and now have no idea if they are losing my messages.
I am a sysadmin for a datacenter, and have a modem/phone line set up just for monitoring pages. Nearly all cell providers provide a "TAP gateway", a dialin number (usually at 4800/9600 baud, you you can utilize that REAL old hardware :) that lets you send SMS messages. This has 2 advantages:
1) Messages sent through a TAP gateway are usually received faster than going through the provider's web or email gateway. IE, seconds instead of minutes or hours.
2) If you are having routing problems, an SMS page via email wouldn't get through, whereas dialing to the TAP gateway just depends on the phone line.
For example on a phone keypad:
English: "Let's meet at the station at 8:00." ==107 keystrokes
Japanese: 8ZzÉwÅïB == 45 keystrokes
BTW, you need to have Japanese encoding enabled to see that correctly. It is so much quicker to email in Japanese that I almost never email in English anymore on my phone.
And in Japan, using SMS/email makes a LOT of sense because in this country, most people are polite enough to not talk on their phones in places like trains and movie theaters. So, if you are on the train and your friend drops you a quick "DZH" ("Where are you now?") you can respond without bothering those around you. Of course, in this country, most people actually do care about bothering those around them. It is a good thing.
About the powerful desktop computers things, if you have been here, then you know full well that most Japanese apartments are the size of a saltines box (my own apartment included). Most people don't care enough to have a huge tower and monitor in their house when they mostly use their home computers for email, web-surfing, and maybe typing papers and letters and making greeting cards for New Year's. The don't need the power of a gaming machine because they use their Playstations to play games rather than their computers. Most people have to use computers at work and consider computers to be a work-only thing that they don't want to have at home.
Just my two yen.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
If you need to get a quick message out to someone or someone wants to get one out to you but doesn't want to disturb you or the others around you because they don't know if you are in a place like those mentioned above, then SMS/email is your friend (as common courtesy is a GOOD thing). Here in Japan, it is considered impolite to use your phone on the trains. Sure some people do, but it is not common at all. People tend to look out for each other.
And another thing. Everytime there is a story about a movie on Slashdot, there are a lot of posts about people who hate going to movies because of "some jerk with a cel-phone". Well, in Japan, EVERYONE has a mobile phone, and not once have I so much as even heard a phone go off in a movie theatre. Why? Common courtesy. We know how to use the Manner Mode on our phones here, and we know that it is incredibly rude to ruin someone else's movie experience.
But, if something is urgent, or the person who is trying communicate with you has no clue where you might be so doesn't know if it is OK to talk or not, SMS/email allows us to maintain common courtesy and communicate in such situations.
That is why we "willingly squint at a tiny screen, and peck at a tiny keyboard to type out some message, reminiscent of the days of the telegraph, instead of just dialing the same damn phone and, god forbid, actually *speak* to someone".
I hope I was able to successfully answer your question.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
First of all, someone noticed, you can set an expiry for SMSes and no initially it's not always st to never. ... at least here.
Second, no matter what you set up in your cell some carriers tend to touch the expiry, just in case, aside from that, many carriers map never to something like 1 week.
Sure, SMSes sometimes get delayed, but 7% loss is definately to high. Delays occur often, when you also have a hard time calling someone in a different network, when he is in a cell which has not any capacity left etc. etc. . (Here NEtworks are so crowded, that calls even get dropped, due to the handovers etc.).
On Top, you can set up your cell, you want a reciept, if the delivery worked. Never got an okay, when a message did not arrive. And I haven't sent any message in months, where I didn'T get a confirmation or which got lost.
Not even tons of messages I sent to friends in other European countries.
So I assume, the figure of 7% is wrong
In Europe, where it is also known as "text messaging," 10 to 15 percent of wireless operators' revenue comes from SMS...
Moan... also known as "text messaging"?
Sorry. also known as SMS I would say.
On all the mobile phones I've used there is a way to turn on delivery reports. When I used this on my Nokia 3330 in the UK I would get a report back once the message was delivered, if it failed to deliver immediately, or if it had tried for too long and the message had timed out (I had it set to a week on my phone). These delivery reports seemed to be 100% reliable in my experience.
With my Siemens C45 here in Kenya I also get messages telling me if the phone was switched off or unreachable, but they are a little confusing, and I've sometimes sent a message several times when my phone said 'Unable to send message, try again?', and then discovered that the recipient got a whole load of copies. Sometimes I don't get the report back and sometimes I do. I think it might be down to the fact that Kencell isn't as reliable as Orange, and also because I'm sending international text messages.
By the way, if your phone doesn't have delivery reports you can add RCT to the start of your message and it will turn on delivery reports. The letters RCT won't be delivered but the rest of the message will. (It might be RPT, I can't remember).
Ho hum for the life of a bear
The GSM specification designates SMS as being transmitted on the control channel when there is sufficient capacity, i.e., it is not guaranteed delivery. In areas that with dense coverage for a relatively low population (such as Finland), you may have extremely high reliability as compared to parts of the US where an SMS may never get to its intended destination due to less capacity (such as New York City, Los Angeles, etc.). Frankly I'm surprised that it's under 10% as that is a considerable improvement.
Back when AOL acquired Time Warner, they tried to migrate in-house e-mail to AOL. Big disaster. About 10% of messages were being lost.
I am not impressed with SMS on my phone at all. I live in the Bay Area, CA, USA and it is far worse than any two-way pager I've had in the past. On average it seems to take 2+ hours to send a message and about 10% of them never arrive (no actual data taken, just rough impression). I've given up on it for anything other than little love messages to my gf, which don't really matter when they arrive.
I don't know how much it has to do with my phone as I will check the phone an hour or two later and it still shows it as trying to send. I've been meaning to look into what the problem is, but never got around to it. This article seems to confirm that it isn't just me.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
The hardware itself is not really designed for reliable message delivery. The software on the SMS servers themselves was seriously buggy. Management interest in reliability was near zero unless a problem specifically affected the ability of one of the company exec's to receive messages.
SMS is like UDP on a loaded network. Maybe your message will make it and maybe it won't.
I've only ever questioned non-delivered SMS on a couple of occasions, and each of these times an SMS has 'not arrived' i've found it sitting in my inbox later on... Turns out it arrived while I was sleeping and I have hit receive (and possibly read it) while sleeping :)
I've also noticed the reverse effect on X-Mas and New Years, I received some SMS' from friends with the usual season greetings messages up to seven times (when the sender had only sent it once). Apparently the same thing happened with several messages I sent too.
That month's bill is due any time soon too... *gulp*
FYI, i'm in Australia, receiving sms is free, sending isn't (I pay between 10 and 18c AUD per sms) and on the Virgin mobile network.
... and then there were none
I live in Israel, I had just returned from a trip to America (where I used my GMS phone) and sent a message to my wife. "On the Bus." The message never arrived. A year later I went to America again and after opening my phone saw that there was a message waiting for me. "On the Bus". Those who know how the GMS server technology works will probably have an idea of how this could have happened...
I have never heard of AIM/ICQ/MSN/... messages getting dropped unless one of the people's client got disconnected and it hadn't registered yet. Also, AIM et al message are always instantaneous.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
Call me sweety, 0190-(high-rate prefix).
Also a lot of SMS advertising. Not so good and due to congestion, messages don't always get through. D2-Vodaphone protect the identity of spammers unless you make a police complaint (costs money).
I'm in the UK, and I send a lot of SMS into other countries (Russia and Turkey particularly, but also to/from France, Sweden, Italy, Denmark etc) and I can't remember the last time I saw an SMS fail when the target phone was reachable.
I've had a few return failure when the destination phone was turned off for a week... but that's the point, I got a failure report back.
I've seen less reliability with sending via commercial SMSCs (eg Novelsoft, who are incidentally blocked by Orange in the UK) but I suspect that's more about networks protecting a juicy revenue stream (read price-gouging).
Normally I've found local (within the city) SMSing pretty reliable, but then I shoot one over to my girl in Jakarta and all bets are off... I estimate she receives 1:3.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
With SMS, I pay the same rate regardless.
A final point is that because an SMS message fits inside a single 'frame', it requires little power to send and a not particularly good connection (not good enough for voice). There are cases of people who couldn't get through by voice, being rescused because SMS did get through.
Can't say I know of a message that has been dropped. Occasionally (on Christmas and New Year) my phone would respond that it can not send the message, but then you can try again.
This is definitely NOT what I'm seeing. Not here in Finland, but also not when I've been travelling in other countries that use GSM. I consider it about on par on reliability with email.
First of all, you get a notification immediately on the phone if the message was delivered or not, just like when you send email. In addition to that, there's a return receipt type system that many people use. I personally don't use it because I've never had any problem with messages not getting through, but I know people who do use it and I've never heard them complain about messages getting lost.
I'm wondering if the SMS messages talked about in the article are really GSM SMS messages? It seems that all European users here are saying that they have no problems what so ever. And this study was made in the USA. Considering that GSM is hardly used at all in the USA, I'm kinda wondering if they are just using "SMS" to describe whatever proprietary text messaging systems are in use in the USA. The true SMS is that of the GSM system, where you can send an SMS to any other GSM user in the world, regardless of their or your telco, with litterally billions of messages sent every day (more than email, as a matter of fact).
The return reciept is your best friend when you try to send SMS in the US. I have learned to love this feature, to make sure that all my recipients always recieve their messages right after I send them. I can also tell wether or not they are at home, because a lot of my friends dont get reception at home, so no reciept = no reception, or the unlikely chance that their phone is off. Hope this helps a few people.
Erin Go Bragh!
> 7.5% of its text messages never reached their destinations Ouch. I don't have SMS - Is this report consistent with your experience?
Yes! I didn't receive these messages, either.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
We use SMS here in Calgary from Telus to get call-outs when our system has problems, and we get far, far, far *WORSE* success rates. It would be fair to say that their SMS system is down more often than it is up. And they actually have the balls to advertise this service. It's total garbage in their case. And that is a generous description. Half the time they don't even know it's down until the next day. Only in my wildest dreams could I hope for a mere 7% failure rate. I have sat on my couch at home watching their TV commercials for SMS service *while* I am receiving messages from when I was on call 5 days ago. So quit your whining.
I wonder how this compares with email?
-- Mike
In europe the phone tells you the moment you send your message if the network has accepted it or not.
If the network has accepted your message for delivery, it will try to deliver it for a certain amount of time (this is configurable on the sender's phone), I have set mine to 72 hours.
You get a delivery report the moment the network has accepted your message, and another one the moment the intended recipient has gotten it.
If after the delay the message couldn't be delivered (read: recipient cellphone was offline during all this time) you get a delivery report for failure, so at least you know it's failed.
This works in almost ALL european countries, the few exceptions are certain operators (like Bouyges Telecom) which filter SMS coming from foreign numbers.
I'd say the service is great, reliable, informative and cheap. As a result, SMS has mostly replaced pagers in Europe.
Is this report consistent with your experience?
Back in 1998 I was working on a frost alarm system for farmers (in Italy). Subscribed farmers would get an SMS containing information about the temperature/wind/precipitaion and a number of other parameters, from hundreds of weather stations all over the area, whenever a configurable event was triggered.
During our test phase all messages arrived, but unfortunately the provider could not handle the rather consistent load, and therefore a high percentage of the alarm SMS arrived only hours (or even days) later, which was - for obvious reasons - useless in that case.
Since then providers in Italy have expanded their message centers, and although I am not working on any such project currently, some colleagues of mine are, and they confirm that nearly all messages arrive at destination, and the ones that don't usually have invalid recipient mobile numbers. You get confirmation messages that not only let you know a message has arrived (or not), but in case of a successful delivery you can also know the exact time the recipient received your message.
On another note, maybe slightly offtopic: some posters have expressed their fear of Telemarketers and Spammers taking advantage of SMS. Personally I have only been spammed by one single company: my mobile provider. That's the main reason why I have changed provider lately (after 5 years). I have never gotten a single spam SMS by anybody else.
In Italy (don't know about other countries) you can get SMS over landlines, too, if you have an SMS enabled phone. If you do not have such a phone, the message will be read to you by the system. Now this is something a bit more scary: it is much easier for Telemarketers to collect a huge database of landline numbers than mobile ones, although since Italy has issued the "privacy law" a few years back, unsolicited advertising (via snail mail or phone) has dropped from "a couple a day" to "max 2 a year".
Have they anything to do with each other?
Like everyone else in Denmark, I use SMS and haven't experienced failures or heard others complain about them.
My phone also have WAP. I have yet to successfully extract any kjind of information from that, and I don't know anyone else around here who even claim to be able to use WAP.
No problems here in South East Asia (Malaysia, to be specific). I was kind of surprised to see SMS to be the killer feature of a mobile phone instead of WAP, but now you can do almost everything with SMS. Buying movie tickets, get stock updates, mobile banking, Y! Messenger on SMS, very very fun stuff.
I would say very close to 100% here in denmark, if the sms is send (the phone answers "your sms has now been send" instead of "your sms has not been send" when you send the sms) it will "always" be receive by the receiver.
Btw. Your poor thing, you don't have sms, don't know how I would live without it.
-- look sir droids...
Though I do admit that in San Francisco I've had regularly SMS messages not being delivered (and the sender getting a bounce); or delivered a day later when the phone switched provider.
This sounds right. I would use SMS a lot more if it were reasonably reliable. This probably has something to do with tower density in the US being a lot lower than the rest of the world (mostly because there's a heck of a lot more area to cover.) As it is, if I can't send an SMS message knowing it's going to go through, it's not worth using.
Outside the US, SMS connectivity is mostly seamless within individual countries, but sending messages to a customer on a provider in another country is still something of a gamble. It will most often work, but if the receiving provider has a block on your provider, the message goes into the big bit-bucket in the sky, and it does not result in a non-delivery message. The situation is improving, but it's still very frustrating to businesses which operate internationally and who would like to be able to use text messaging to reach their own customers - which is how I come to have this background information.
Note that one reason that text messaging is now mostly seamless within national borders is that where, in the early days of SMS deployment in Europe, there was significant resistance by the providers - especially the large ex-monopolies - to interoperating with their competitors, the telecoms regulators stepped in and insisted that this nonsensical situation was corrected. With the amount of revenue the providers are now getting from the service, they're certainly no longer complaining that this was done ;)
Maybe there are additional issues of technical incompatibilities between different US providers that make message interoperability more complex and expensive, maybe the US providers are reckoning on skipping SMS and concentrating on getting mobile email deployed widely. But I can't help thinking they're missing out on a potentially very lucrative service.
I work for a media company in the UK and we do a VAST amount of SMS - primarily for user interaction with our shows. Non-delivery really is a non-issue for us - the main problem is time to delivery. In the past we could easily bring down several local cells if we put through enough SMS in a short enough time - and then we would have to wait for a fairly long time for the SMSCs to deliver them. We now have direct connections into the major Telco SMSCs here in the UK and have a VERY high throughput but even at peak times (Sat afternoon football matches, etc) our SMS delivery times are reduced.
While I know that SMS is deemed unreliable, it is used in mission critical uses in Finland in which messages must be received by the recipients.
;) get all of our calls to duty (semi-professionals) through SMS to our mobile phones. With my SO and I both being on call it is interesting to see how most calls arrive at exactly the same time, regardless of how busy the networks are. It is, after all, only a matter of priority.
The Fire Department I work for (and most others in Finland as well
And, BTW, the default expiration in Finnish networks is 72 hours, and you don't get a confirmation unless you request it (both options can be set in most modern phones)...
Alas, the US really seems to be lagging behind in this.
I believe that, here in Italy, a figure of 1 message lost every 17-20 is quite accurate.
And OF COURSE that one message that gets lost is the most important one, the answer to THAT date proposal or something like this; but I guess that this is just ordinary Murphy's law...
In my job, I've long since given over server monitoring alerts to SMS. Not by choice, but simply because getting phone lines run and attached to various data centers owned by different companies around the world ceased to be practical. In my case, a single lost message would add up to 15 more minutes of downtime that I didn't know about (and potentially a PHB getting a notice and thinking I'm slacking off!)
Its unfortunate, but a lot of reliability these days is being traded for convenience. I love being able to carry a cell phone in case of emergencies, but the number of dropped and uncompleted calls is way out of proportion with land based systems. Text paging via a landline is gone in favor of SMS over the internet. Again, another point of failure.
At what point are we going to say easy isn't worth the price of poor service?
Whoops, I need to go reboot windows now.
Last Xmas night, italian people sent 300 million
SMS with greetings (note, we've about 60 million
inhabitants).
I've sent about 10 SMSs that night, and despite
the huge overload they all have been correctly delivered.
The same happened Dec 31th.
I don't remember anyone saying his messages were lost: the worst case was the phone saying immediatly "message not sent, try later".
7.5% lost is laughable.
HELLO?
SMS - Short Message Service.
In cellular phones.
Not ICQ or whatever on the net.
Service provided by cellular telecommunication companies for money. Big money, its a major cash cow.
Nothing to do with the internet (apart from the fact that you can send SMS to a cellular phone using an internet portal).
I hope the metamoderation catches the moderators as well.
...that did arrive, 56 % were ignored by the recipient
That's my understanding anyway, I may have glossed over some important details 'cuz this is one area of the wireless world that I'm (frankly) a little bit hazy on...
Early on in the use of SMS in Europe, I remember reading that this kind of thing was happening - basically the servers involved were being overloaded at peak times and were discarding messages in a random fashion to get the loading down.
I remember there was a bit of a scandal about it, and the phone firms promised to clean up their act. Since then I've never lost a message...
I can't find anything in Google to corroborate this - anyone?
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
Nice to see the US Cellular market comming along. I beleive it was in the early 90's that we were reporting this in Europe.
I had this problems a few years ago in delevery between providers (technical & politcal problems).
But now it is very reliable.
Delevery reports should be used to control the success.
Nowadays it SMS even works reliable between Switzerland and India
Here, in the UK at least and probably Europe wide, we send sms over both the SS7 network and the internet.
Check out this page and this page for free text messaging.
100 free per month, and U GT 2 USE A QBOARD 2 INPUT LTTRS! THNK FCK!
Ok, that's enough advertising.
Incidentally, I've only experienced a message not being delivered once, on new years eve 1999. But then again, I avoid using my mobile for voice calls let alone nasty txt mssgs!
It also means that 7.5% of SMS spam did not reach their recipient, which is good.
Think of SMS like email. People care, or they wouldn't be using the service in the first place.
Most of us have voice mail on our phones? Why does anyone want to turn their cell phone into the electronic equivalent of a doggy leash?
SMS costs less than a voice mail, is sent quickly and at your leisure, and you don't always need/want to speak to the person for certain things (just like email, right?)
It's bad enough when you have to carry a pager for work
SMS has pretty much replaced pagers around here. Why get a stupid pager when you can get a pager + phone as a single device.
voluntarily subjecting yourself to that kind of intrusion strikes me as nuts.
What kind of rubbish is that. If you don't like or want to be disturbed, don't buy the phone in the first place. Or switch it off when it's inconvenient.
In addition, dishonest marketers and at least some cell service providers are using SMS to send unwanted bulk marketing messages
I feel sorry for my american peers.. We have no SMS spam problems in Europe. Please, don't assume that we do, because your assumptions would be wrong. And people have to get your cellphone number before they can SMS you, which they can't.
AT&T, my cell phone service provider, is apparently one of those.
That's too bad, for you and for their other customers. There are certainly better operators out there, who provide excellent service, and keep their customers at peace !
After I read complaints from a number of AT&T users who had been SMS-spammed and who said that AT&T refused to stop,
Sue them ! In the USA everyone is free to sue everybody else for any reason, right ? Use that right.
Don't assume that each new "feature" offered by your cell phone provider (or your ISP) is something you want.
First of all you don't HAVE to use the features. Then, don't assume that everybody out there has crap service, because if you knew how good it gets in some places it would make yourself want to try it ! (and you might even like it....)
-forged
The most definitive book on GSM is unfortunately hard to get:
5 9
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/09455921
The GSM System for Mobile Communications
Mouly, Pautet
From the people who worked on the standard.
Also, note that in countries with a properly working GSM network (that is, almost anywhere except the US), SMS do work just fine despite the fact that they have no reliability guarantee and no maximum delivery time guarantee BY DESIGN.
Also, most people are using SMS delivery notifications to get information if and when their SMS has been delivered. That is, you get notified by SMS if your SMS has been delivered, with a timestamp, or are notified when your SMS has been delayed or lost, also with a timestamp. Using this backchannel and a simple timeout, reliable SMS delivery and notification can be implemented just as TCP is being implemented on a protocol like IP that just guarantees "best effort" delivery of packets.
Finally, why is SMS popular? Because it is quiet and it is asynchronous. You do not have to answer the phone in order to receive an SMS, but can handle the issue when you are ready and have the time. In Europe, you do send an SMS for just about everything, unless the matter is urgent and requires immediate attention of the callee.
Kristian
Arg, honestly I'm so glad I live in New Zealand. I could not stand to use a phone system where I had to pay to get things.
It costs me NZ 20 cents to send anyone anywhere in the world a SMS. I'm on the Vodafone GSM network so I don't have access to everyone, but if I do have access the cost is always the same. And I never have to pay to recieve anything.
As for the failure rate of messages I would say that 99% get through, and that when they don't I'm advised of the failure and don't have to pay. The only time I've noticed it happening is on New Years Eve at midnight and I can fully understand why the problem occurs.
Norwegians using SMS every day by age:
15-25 90%
26-35 60%
36-55 40%
87% of all Norwegians older than 15 have a mobile phone.
In 2000 1.16 billion SMS messages were sent by Norwegian mobile phone users. On New Year's Eve this year 20 million SMS messages were sent.
Not bad for 4.5 million people...
According to my friend in Telenor Mobil, the larges GSM network provider in Norway, once the SMS message enters the network, it should not be lost. Under extreme load (like New Year's Eve) the system starts buffering the messages. Once the buffer is full, the system prioritizes new messages and the buffered messages are not handled before the load comes down again. This explains why some messages are delayed for hours while others go straight through in extreme load situations. Messages that can't be serviced straight away in those situations are denied entry into the network and the user gets a network error message when trying to send the SMS.
Sources:
http://telecom.no/arkiv/art/2092.html
http://www.vg.no/pub/vgart.hbs?artid=9719804
I can not ever remember sending a message and not getting a reply... (and I send quite a few ).
I have had problems with all 4 networks (Tel$tra has two - GSM and CDMA) mostly the messages problems are delays (up to a couple of days), even when both phones on same network.
I heard a rumor that Tel$tra was thinking of providing an enhanced service for a higher fee (this would provide a guarantee of delivery, confirmation of delivery, etc. Guess they know that the service sucks.
And I bet you pay even if the message isn't delivered!
I currently have a Proximus contract (leading GSM operator in .be), and I'd say 99.5% of my SMS's reach their destination (if you don't count those sent at newyear or valentine's day).
I'd say the other 2 operators (Mobi* and Base) must have about the same numbers.
Furthermore, we have this "confirmation" thing. If we enable it, we get a reply when the message has actually arrived on phone of the correspondent....
LogicaCMG as of this year!
If you're into SMS, you might do well to remember that company: I believe that Logica and CMG (now LogicaCMG) together have 85-90% of the world market for SMS software.
So if you lose a message, you know who to call.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
For the last few months, about one in ten text messages I've sent have just vanished into the ether - no delivery, no error message. Interestingly enough, O2 seem to be perfectly capable of billing me for every SMS, regardless of whether they manage to send it or not.
Texting used to be very reliable, which means it's all the more annoying as I've come to depend on SMS for organising my social life. For example:
"You at the pub yet?"
"Nope - you?"
"Nearly - call me when you get there."
"Okay. Wot you drinking?"
"Lager shandy."
"Poof!"
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Been using SMS here in the uk for the last 5 years and dont rememeber one going missing. Even used SMS in Thialand 4 years ago without a hitch. Also, on the Nokias you can get free delivery notes for all your SMSs, very useful if the other person has there's off or has no network.
This can't be right. Here (Hong Kong) the reception rate of both inter-network SMS and international SMS messages must be at least 99%.
SMS is one of the biggest revenue generation tools for Mobile operators in Europe and Asia, there are millions of messages sent every day, at a cost that varies but taking 5c as an average wouldn't be too bad a guess.
So how the hell is this moderated as "Insightful" when the person who wrote it confused MSN, Yahoo Instant Messenger et al with the Short Message Service that comes with GSM mobile phones.
And to answer his question, you CAN pay for a reliable IM environment which includes auditing and many enterprises have already installed such products.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
The whole point about SMS technology imo is that its that whoever's receiving it can choose when/if to answer; and that i can send it whenever i want without being worried about disturbing someone.
And that truly is one necessary service; nothing else is close to filling the niche for time-insensitive semi-important "want to meet up later?" messages! Sure it could be better; and i've experienced a few problems myself with the network in Norway; but its *good* enough as it is.
Last year, we had 1 day with problems, new years eve. It did take a couple of hours for messages to get delivered, so we got all messages for free. But messages lost, yes 5 years ago yes... not anymore.
Then everything got slower and slower, as if a single 386 pc was acting as gateway to the entire network (it should take two seconds to download a page, not ten!) and the client decided to crash (really crash! I had to unplug the battery) when it got to the final screen (which said which trains to catch). So I stopped using it.
Perhaps they decided to send 2049 byte pages and I had a 2048 byte machine, who knows. It just seems that the actual service did not live up anywhere near the (very limited) technical specifications.
I have SMS on my phone but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to use it. It seems that using SMS is not as easy as it seems 'cause most of the people I know who have it don't use it either. And these are mostly high-end techies.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
First time I found out about it was when a decidedly non-tech friend accidently SMS'ed my home number instead of my cell number - and it worked!
I used to work for a company that provided a lot of bulk SMS services (NOT SPAM!), and we worked with all the major service providers here in the UK. We found that particularly during peak times, most of the operators would have no problems with dumping a batch of messages from their SMSC's, particularly if they had not been delivered for a few hours (phone memory full, phone off, that kinda thing).
--- Brian the Wise Friend to Small Fury Animals Everywhere...
Receiving an SMS sent three days ago isn't all that uncommon in Norway, especially in periods of high traffic (holidays etc.) - so if the tests don't account for these delays, there are sure to be messages recorded as "lost" when they, in fact, just take a LONG time.
sig sig sputnik
My SMS service through Verizon works fine, I get the messages within a minute of the other person sending them, but it only works when I am in a digital reception area. I go to school about an hour and a half away from where I bought my phone, and a different service provider is in this area, I get a great analog signal, but because I dont get a digital signal, that means that I can't get SMS messages, or voice mail notifications until I go back into a Verizon digital area.
Hello? Hello? Damn. Charlie, I think it's broken.
The results posted are absolutely useless. As one who has actually builds and maintains these systems, I would suggest the success rate is actually MUCH (99+) higher for in-system sms, and getting much better for inter-carrier messages. The problem with "surveys" like this is that you have no idea how the test was conducted. Because SMS uses the forward control channel, which which is also used for call set up, regnots...etc., subscriber density in a given cell sector can have a HUGE impact on "first try" message success. If the control channel is busy at the second the message hits the switch, the message will get queued at the SMSC for retry.
Obviously, if you have 50 phones in one cell sector, and hit them with 100
messages at a time, a higher percentage than normal will get queued.
The problem most folks here seem to have is with the retry rate.
Each carrier sets the retry rate in their SMSCs on a individual basis. Because there are costs associated with the trunking of SS7 traffic, some carriers choose to set the rate at an unbelievably slow pace. I am aware
of one carrier who has a retry rate of every 6 hours for 72 hours. This means if your phone is off, in an analog coverage area (there are still huge
swaths of America which do not have digital coverage),or busy your message will be retried in 6 hours( if the phone's still in the same condition your screwed for another 6).
The cell phone is not a multi-tasking device. Even the newer "smart" phones cannot handle more that one OTA process at a time, so its all about retry rate. In general, we have found that the smaller regional/local carriers do a better job with SMS then the big boys, simply because they
have reduced trunking costs, and are more willing to up the retry rate.
Good, but part A is wrong. Here's a more accurate description of how it works.
Phone sends SMS to your network's SMS centre. If it does not get the final 'acknowledged' message from the SMSC in this transaction, it reports 'Message sending failed' after about 10 seconds.
Your network's SMSC then attempts to deliver the message to its destination. Delivery reports on Nokia phones, when they say "Pending", only mean that your phone successfully talked to the SMS centre, and not that it is 'waiting to be received'. If there is an error (e.g. unknown number), you will get a message back (usually within 20 seconds) saying "Message [id] to [number] rejected...".
If the user's phone is switched on, has space for text messages, and there is no network congestion, the message will be received instantly. If not, the SMSC will retry every minute for ten minutes, then every ten minutes for an hour, then every hour until the expiry time on the message. If all these attempts fail, you will get a message back (usually after a week) saying "Message [id] to [number] failed".
Once the message is delivered, you receive a report saying "Message [id] to [number] delivered...".
(All of this is only if you have delivery reports enabled on your phone, and if your network supports them. UK O2 subscribers can enable delivery reports by putting *0# at the start of the message, but, as O2 are rather behind the times, the option in the phone menu doesn't work, just as the little answerphone icon doesn't work either. Nokia phones intercept the delivery reports and present them in a 'friendly' manner - i.e. don't give you the first bit of text of the message, so you have no idea which message got through!)
So that's what's been happening to all my first posts.
... the SMSC vendor, also how the SMSC are arranged.
Networks with only one SMSC can experience overload on Mobile Originated (MO) SMS. More commonly the problem is actually Mobile Terminated (MT) SMS as the SMSC needs to query the HLR while keeping the handle on the SMS 'open'. A large number of 'open' MT SMS can easily fill the agailable memory on an SMSC. Theis problem is exacerbated with bulk SMS and SMS submitted to the SMSC via an X.25 or IP conenction from an information server.
Networks usually have several SMSC, one to deal with MO SMS and several to deal with MT.
Check out:
= /m ms/
http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,1522,,00.html?orig
(SMS with pictures etc.)
I'd say >99.5% of my messages are sucessful. And if it's really something that critical I'd tend to phone the person anyway, as they may have left their mobile at home, or dead battery... etc.
SMS seems to be 99.99% reliable here in Ireland. If a message doesn't arrive, you get a failure notice, and delivery receipts let you know if messages arrived or not.
I've also used SMS extensively while roaming all over Europe. Approx 98% of the time they're delivered within a few minutes, but occasionally you lose a message, or they take a few days to arrive. That's why you don't send anything important over SMS.
I've had a different SMS annoyance happen to me before.
A couple months ago, I was once sitting in a mall eating lunch, when my phone started beeping VERY loudly. It was an SMS message. Was it an important email? No, it was T-Mobile telling me about some retarded service from them than I would never buy.
Well, Buenos Aires anyway, the network doesn't cover anywhere else. Here on holiday, reading /. God, that's sad.
Every single SMS I've sent from here, to the UK and to Russia, has been delivered. The only SMSs that I've received are from my network operator in the UK (Orange). Not even "people on Orange in the UK" - only from Orange themselves.
Clearly the network can deliver SMS from the UK to Argentina - I think I'll have words with Orange when I get back to .uk (and I'm not paying GBP1.30 a minute roaming charges...)
I'm from Germany and never had problems with SMS. Although I don't send too much SMS, most teens here have mobile phones and among the 12 to 16 year old it's quite common to write messages to arrange dates and chat with each other, even while sitting in the classroom. Since many people seem to rely on SMS for communication, it must be quite reliable. "I didn't get your SMS" just isn't an excuse here anymore.
It says all in there!
[no warranties of service whatsoever...]
I can't say that I've experianced any problems with SMS messages being deleivered. In fact we have found that using e-mail to an SMS gateway is more reliable than any of the paging services that we have tried. We used to get pages months later, where as now its rarely more than minutes before we recieve sms messages. I can't think of a single one that I've missed in the last few months and I recieve several hundred per month from the servers here.
I think the reliablity does have alot to do with your carrier and location. Here in NC Verizion seems to be pretty reliable. I can't speak for other locations or carriers though.
If you send the message as an e-mail, the evil telcos won't have to pay the evil CMG gateway people their ridiculous SMPP gateway fee! So, you save money for the provider that is almost certainly screwing you!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It's widely agreed that the US digital cell network is much less developed than in many european countries, where the networks are all-digital and are used everywhere (since landlines are less common).
I don't know what sms messages have been lost, but I know that I've missed calls when I'm at full antenna strength. And I've had my sms informing me I have voicemail arrive late or not at all. This will improve as the networks are updated.
Most of the problems are caused by incorrect SS7 translations between the different wireless companies. T-Mobile, Sprint etc isn't always going to have 100% accurate or current information about their competitors STP's and network backbone or visa versa.
In my experience sending international SMS for the past 3+ years I've found the Short Message Service to be a very unreliable service.
Part of the problem is that there is no authoritative confirmation of delivery. There is a way to request a reply but it's left up to the user to decide, if they get it - sort of like email, but without a bounceback like email.
It is especially annoying with international SMS because some providers don't have agreements and it's next to impossible to determine which system is rejecting the message. Point: I use VoiceStream (T-Mobile, blah, service is worse now, blah) and I can send to most (weirdness: not all!) subscribers of the Romanian GSM provider Connex, but not to the only other major player in the Romanian market, namely Orange (old name: Dialog). As you can imagine, this really sucks because some of my friends have one and some the other. And to top it all off, I can only send to 90% of my friends that use Connex, plus it's a hit-n-miss - about 10% don't make it, seems to be random.
Gee, SMS is unreliable? What do you expect? Here in the Northeast, most wireless VOICE service sucks. Verizon seems to be the best of the bunch, but I routinely call people and always get transfered to voice mail. When I get called back the person usually tells me that their phone was on, but it didn't ring.
20 years after cellular service was first started, the network is still crap. Most carriers know this, but don't want to hike up their CAP EX to fix the problem.
SMS won't get better until the wireless networks get better.
-ted
i worked for vodafone in their SMS dept., before the stupid selfish cunts fired me, but i digress. what we found was as long as the servers were running properly, and if the code was up on its logic, and the receiving phone was turned on, then everything worked. 99% of all sms failures were due to issues with the receiving hand set: not on, low battery, out of area, etc. Of course the big wigs didn't want to hear that cuz they all a bunch of cocksmokers, who could tell the difference between their own ass and a hole in the ground, even if spotted them 2 butt checks, but i'm not bitter
... now that we've got Java phones and GPRS.
I've already installed a goddamnit IRC client on my phone, not only is it cheaper but I can guarantee it's more geeky... and makes people drop their eyes, as this is nothing like those new phone/pda combos that are all scream, but perfectly regular looking and very small phone.
Guess other IM clients as well as email exist too, but most of my e-friends are on IRC instead of ICQ/MSN or whatever.
So that explains those missing booty call Text Messages.
DAMNIT!
blah
Finally, I found someone else with AT&T, and then only 1/4 of my messages never arrived. Woo-hoo. The really annoying bit was when I would get replies back hours after they were sent. Or someone would take the trouble to go to AT&T's web site to enter a message for me and it would either never arrive or arrive hours later...
And they wanted $.10 per message? Ridiculous! I might as well write the messages on dimes and throw them into the Missouri river, hoping they'll get where I want them to go.
I have tons of extra minutes (nights/weekends) -- Why can't these %*(@! providers just charge 1/2 minute or so per message?!
I live in India, and SMS works like a charm here. Its incredibly useful in places where you can barely find any other way of messaging anyone. There are too many places in India where you wont find a phone booth, but you can always SMS away! Another advantage is that here, incoming SMS is free. Even, if you're on pre-paid, and you've run out of cash on your card, people can still message you. Delivery receipts are a boon too. :)
I find SMS so useful that I wrote up an app to use it as a remote monitoring tool for servers anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world.
Check out SMSTerm at http://freshmeat.net/projects/smsterm
Nikhil.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Long answer: At least here in Germany and in the other places I've been in Europe, I can't confirm the article's claim. Of course, if you're in France with a German cell phone sending an SMS to a British cell phone currently in Switzerland (did that), it might take a few minutes for the message to arrive. But the only case of loss I encountered was when the receiving phone was shut off for longer periods of time, because SMSs time out after a sender-definable time span. So, to sum up, no gripes.
While I agree that's one reason, the other reason Americans call people more than Europeans is the cost. Most Americans have cell phone plans that include some large number of minutes per month (or even commonly unlimited nights and weekends), so there's no cost to just calling someone up and talking to them for 2 minutes. Europeans, on the other hand, generally have to pay by the minute for outgoing calls, so are much more likely to do things like send the cheaper SMS.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
With the amount of SMS messages going around and the quality I wonder why phone companies dare to ask the high price they do ask for sending an SMS.
The Virtual Bookcase: book reviews
I was in this prematurely air conditioned supermarket and there were all
these aisles and there were these bathing caps you could buy that had these
kind of Fourth of July plumes on them that were red and yellow and blue and
I wasn't tempted to buy one but I was reminded of the fact that I had been
avoiding the beach.
-- Lucinda Childs "Einstein On The Beach"
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