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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
"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...
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
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.
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
----
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Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
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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?
... 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
Newsflash! Picture phones are low-quality!
...has reached it's destination. That's 100% of the messages I read. ;)
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.
I don't know how popular it is in the US, but text messaging is big over here. People chat by text message about all sorts of things too trivial to ring someone about, plus you can text someone from situations where you couldn't call - such as during a class, etc. The networks operators love it - at $0.10 per message on most pre-paid service, it generates tons of cash or very little network traffic. It was the big surprise money generator when they launched GSM.
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.
I assume you mean on SMS. If you mean in email too, I'm moving to Norway, no matter how cold it is this time of year! ;P
Catherine
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.
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
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 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...
I don't know how popular it is in the US, but text messaging is big over here. People chat by text message about all sorts of things too trivial to ring someone about
Don't worry, over here in the States nothing is too trivial to make a cell phone call about, especially when driving it seems.
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?"
What if you remember something you want to tell someone at 2am, I'm not going to call them and wake them jsut to say "Don't forget the CD in the morning" when I can just SMS it they'll get it when they feel like. Sure I could call them in the morning (as long as I remember then, or write it down to remind me) but then I can also jsut SMS it and be done. SMS does not demand instant attention like a phone (God I hate stopping things just to answer the phone) and it also doesn't require instant responses if you want to think about something.
You might have virtually free calls where you are, but here it's pretty much the same to call someone for 30secodns as it is to just SMS them. Call when you want a longer chat sure, but just SMS them if you want something trivial.
As for the whole hunt and peck entry, I've got a pretty small Nokia (8850) but with predictive text and nimble fingers I have no problems typing out a 120 character message in 30 seconds. If you have fat fingers or lower dexterity then try a different phone, or get one of those keyboards that Ericssons have or just don't use SMS.
On a side note I've not specifically noticed any missing messages (although that could be like the Australian porn legislation, how would I know if I'm missing something?) although I do get the occasional "Messaged Undelivered" back when it's either busy or I'm crossing the bridge on the train. That's another point, you can SMS on a train and not be one of those arseholes who yell into the phone at peak hour! If I get a call on the train then I hang it up, nothing can be so critical that they can't wait for 10 minutes or leave me a voice mail so that I can get back to them later.
In democracy your vote counts. In feudalism your count votes.
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.
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
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
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.