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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.
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
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psxndc
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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
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.
If an SMS message is lost on the network, does it make a custom ringtone?
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?
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
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.
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?
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
... 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.
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
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'm makin dis post on me phon right now. u'd be surprizd how massages get mangled in tranzit. Noe wot I mean? LOL
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!
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).
...has reached it's destination. That's 100% of the messages I read. ;)
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
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.
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
I am using SMS to relay this message and
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?
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.
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.
I'm in the UK and I can't say I've EVER known an SMS to disappear. However, around 10% do seem to suffer from delays of up to an hour or more. Most are virtually instataneous. This sounds like someone's got an anti GSM agenda to me...
That was classic intercourse!
I have yet to see a lost SMS
Of course you have yet to see a lost SMS. If you actually saw it, then it wouldn't be lost!
Sorry, couldn't resist the lame joke...
No, that's exactly what teens do. Look at Europe, SMS is massively driven by the teen market sending each other crap like that. It's a huge industry.
-----
Im in the UK and I cant think of a single instance where an SMS hasnt arrived. I send tons and always get my reply.
loply.com
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.
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 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
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.
... 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.
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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
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.
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
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
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
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).
> 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.
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".
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.
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
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...
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.