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Secondary Exam Results In India Mean An SMS Flood

Posted by timothy on from the what'jdaget-huh-what'jdaget? dept.

syrinje writes "The Times of India reported that Indian high-school seniors who took the exams conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education sent more than a Million SMS messages within a 11 hour period to query the result database and receive detailed examination results. In addition making the results available to cellphone users, the CBSE has also published the results online at a dedicated web-site . Since the results were announced on the weekend, students would otherwise have had to wait for Monday to get their results from their schools. A spokesperson for Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited , one of the operators involved in setting up the SMS result system estimated that they handled 100,000 messages per hour during the day on Sunday and said that "There was no problem in the network due to the heavy SMS traffic and we were able to give subjectwise marks to the students"."

3 of 244 comments (clear)

  1. Too Open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you go to the page, and click on exam results, you can enter a roll number.

    Roll numbers starting with 12 seem to work, and in less than a minute I had the results of 5 students. Complete names, grades, pass/fail status.

    This would never fly in the US. There are laws against the publication of this type of data (apparently)

  2. When the SMS is incorrect by Rurouni+Joe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Below is a link to a story of teenager who commited suicide after receiving an sms telling her she had failed, when in reality she had passed. It just goes to show the pressures some of these teenagers face in India today.

    news.com.au

  3. Try 100,000 messages in 5 seconds by jpatokal · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This is newsworthy more from a societal than a technological point of view. 100,000 messages per hour (=27 msg/s) is chicken feed for your typical SMSC, which usually measure traffic in hundreds of SMSes per second. There are even SMS bulk delivery tools that plug directly into SS7 and claim a throughput of 20,000 messages per second. Working in the industry myself (at a competitor, mind you) I'm a little skeptical about this particular claim, but I do know that there are SMSC networks out there capable of handling sustained loads of several thousand msg/s.

    But it's neat anyway. Then again, I thought it was pretty nifty to be able to call me university's automated service and get my results via phone 10 years ago... although I'm sure that little wait between "You have..." and "passed" was put there on purpose!.

    Cheers,
    -j.