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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.
This is true for the UK sure, but if it fails you get a message back - always.
--
D
"CSLib Menace strikes back"
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.
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
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
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.
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 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."
YES!! (Damn mod points - never there when you need them)
A year+ ago I was trying to set up system-automated cell text messaging from Peregrine ServiceCenter to the Verizon phones carried by our sysadmins. Would only work about 50% of the time, so we scrapped the idea and reverted back to the Hell^Hp Desk calling admins.
Long story short, I went through 3 levels of support at Verizon to figure out that this was the problem only to subsequently find out there was no way for us the change the expiration through their service. Wonder if that's been fixed yet?
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
I live in Finland, and I have yet to see a lost SMS, even during peak periods, such as new years or christmas. Sure, the messages may arrive 2-3h late, but they do arrive.
I might add that, despite being a small country, the cell-phone/SMS usage rate is remarkably high, especially in the major cities.
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.
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
You're charged for _recieved_ messages? I assume this carrier has some really great selling point to counteract this?
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
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 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
In Germany when they first introduced SMS they were free, they later added packages and you paid I think 29 Pf (around 10 cents?) for a message. SENDING I might add not receiving.
Now I am in Canada and my current provider (Fido) charges me 10 cents for each message I receive (and sent) that is pretty bad I must say.
I don't use SMS much, first of all hardly anyone here knows that AT&T and Fido offer this service and even if they rather call.
The only time I use it is to send messages to some friends back in Germany who are too lazy to use email.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
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.
I would have to concure. I live in Japan, where there is actually email as well as SMS. SMS is rarely used since email is more flexible. In the year I have had my phone, I've only had one incident where someone asked why I didn't reply to a message that I never received. Although, knowing the person, it was entirely possible they were a bit $h!7-faced and sent it to someone else.
Also, 10 cents per SMS??? I'd have to write a damned long email on my phone to get charged like that.
Check out DoCoMo's English Site to see what your missing.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
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.
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.