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?"

'Bout time someone noticed this

[FattyBoeBatty]

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.

[e-mail]

at best 3% failure rate

[Slurpee]

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?

When I lived in Europe...

[Osrin]

... 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.

Re:SMS: intrusive and an invitation to spammers

[Dr_LHA]

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?

This is a response that is typical amongst Americans. Apparently SMS is useless and why don't people just call instead? However this is ignoring the vast number of SMS being sent by private individuals in Europe where cell phone take-up is much higher than in the US. There must be some reason why it's so popular? It's not all spam (in fact I've never received a SMS spam). There's billions and billions of text messages being sent each year (according to this article [bbc.co.uk] 125 million SMS messages were sent on New Years eve in the UK alone), rivalling email in volume, and certainly overtaking it as an easy and quick messaging system for the masses. SMS is quick, simple and easy way to communicate with people. Much easier than phoning, I can SMS 15 friends at once with the simple message "Meet @ Dog & Hound @ 10pm".

So yes - there's many of us who find text messaging a excellent form of communication, much easier than pagers, email or even calling someone. It fills a niche and as such is an astoundingly popular. So it's pretty important that SMS messages arrive or not!

No more "what's the point of SMS" comments please, if you can't figure out what to use it for you're probably just too old to understand what these young-uns are doing with new fangled technology today. ;-)

Re:SMS: intrusive and an invitation to spammers

[horne]

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?

Hmm, let's look at this :

Voicemail requires me to call me provider to get the message at $0.xx/min

Voicemail requires me to have a pen handy to write down any useful notes

Voicemail requires me to remember my callers return #

Voicemail requires me to stop a conversation so I can listen to a message

Voicemail requires me to call it back if I forget the message.

With SMS, i have the message in text, the sender's callerID is on the message, if they enter any phone #'s I can extract them with a button press, The text is always available, I can reply to the sender without making a call, and If i'm in a meeting I can read and respond to urgent messages with out being too antisocial.

I'll use SMS over Voicemail any day of the week

So SMS in the USA is broken then.

[horne]

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.

Re:Why not just call?

[GordoSlasher]

I don't use SMS but I can certainly see a use for it. What if you're in a situation where you cannot speak out loud but still want to communicate? If I'm sitting in a boring meeting that I'm required to attend, I can't just ring up my girlfriend and start talking!

Re:SMS is Monty Python humour

[Wampus Aurelius]

I'm going to take the devil's advocate here and say that lots of people are visual learners, and communicate way better through reading and writing than through speech. Even though you pay more for it, and it takes longer, it's harder to stutter in text than in speech. I, for one, talk on IM much more than I talk on the phone. I also can express myself more eloquently in text than in speech. Furthermore, one gets more time to carefully consider what they're saying, and review what's been said, through text as compared to a voice conversation. The difficulty in sending long messages makes people more aware of what words are really necessary for the message, and what words are fluff.

If you look at SMS as an evolution of IM or ICQ, rather than a replacement for voice, then the service makes much more sense.

Re:Why not just call?

[core_blimey]

Squint? Either get glasses or get a better phone! It's not that hard to read most phones really.

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.

You've obviously never used SMS or IM

[InfiniteWisdom]

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.

Re:SMS is Monty Python humour

[denzombie]

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.

Dude, you are missing the point.
It's not about cost, SMS is a tool to bypass the conversation protocols. Instead of calling someone and spending several minutes of:
"hey."
"wassup."
"nuthin."
"what cha doing?"
"nuthing.
"you doing anything?"
"no."
"let's go to the club."
"sure."
"I'll see ya there."
"Hey, wait."
"What?"
"Ummm, nuthin, I forgot."
"Ok, see ya there."
"Ok."

You can type:

"Meet me at the club if you're free"

And there are many ways to get text in.(product_placement) The Treo has a easy to use keyboard. (/product_placement).
So there.

I can explain...

[interactive_civilian]

NineNine said:

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?

Here's a good reason: Have you ever ridden on a crowded train? Have you ever been to a movie theater? Have you ever been in a Library? Do you want to hear people yapping away on their phones in those places?

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.

Re:SMS is Monty Python humour

[Idarubicin]

So what do you do with this wonderful invention?

I could take it to the symphony so that receiving important messages ("Your wife is in labour" or "A kidney donor has been found" or "The server melted down and we're losing $6000 per minute and the other admin is in a coma") can get through without annoying people around me. Your phone/pager/SMS device is set to vibrate (at most) when you receive a call, right? Less important messages ("Honey, can you pick up some milk on your way home") can be safely filed for future reference. No furtive and very annoying (to those around you) conversations, no cryptic number on a little tiny pager display.

I can take it to the pub and not have to find a quiet place to hear messages. I have on more than one occasion been unable to receive an ordinary call because of ambient noise. SMS might have been very helpful.

I can always leave my phone at home if I don't want to be disturbed--I'm not dumb enough to have given my boss the number.

Re:SMS is Monty Python humour

[macpeep]

Could you be any more ignorant? SMS, like voice mail, is a supporting function to calls. Their benefit is that they are un-obtrusive to write as well as to send. Just like email. You can read them are respond to them when you like, or ignore them if you don't consider them important. Unlike calls, which demand your attention NOW!

Some typical situations where I use SMS:

- on the subway: "hey, i'll be about 5 minutes late"

- replying to an SMS like the one above with "ok, no problem"

- somewhere without a TV or radio and I want to know the results from the Formula 1 race: "F1" Back comes the results, with short commentary if there were some big accident with injury or similar

- during a meeting, when my phone rang but the person didn't get through because the phone was set on silent to not disturb the meeting: "in meeting. i'll call you after it! was it something urgent?"

- in Thailand, rather than spending 5 euros per minute (or whatever) on a call: "the plane is 10 hours late. don't bother coming to the airport, i'll take a cab"

And no. They are not unreliable. Like so many other person's here have pointed out, SMS's work well enough that you don't even think about reliability issues. I personally don't remember any instance where I would have lost an SMS and over the years, I must have sent several thousands of SMS's. And you know, you actually get confirmation when you send it if it was delivered, PLUS, there's a return receipt system.

The article in this story is talking about text messaging in the *USA*. I wouldn't even be so sure it's about GSM SMS but rather the article writer might just be using "SMS" as a term for proprietary US text messaging systems.

It's perceived commercial interests.

[Doctor Hu]

First, a bit of history. SMS is something of a bolt-on to the basic mobile phone mechanism: my understanding is that the data is carried in a part of the signalling scheme that also handles call setup and other control functions. The telcos may have thought of it as a next-generation pager service with the benefit of answerback, of interest mostly to large organisations that need to contact staff who are on the move. It's clear that the telcos never expected that such a limited medium would take off in the way it has, especially in the youth market in Europe. And this growth has presented a problem to the telcos: the SMS mechanism had no built-in support for cross-charging between carriers for forwarding each other's messages. Presumably the original thought was that the message traffic would be mostly confined within individual networks, and that what little inter-network traffic took place would be pretty well-balanced between different providers in any case, so there was no need to complicate the design to handle charging issues. Now, volumes and imbalances are large enough that providers are reluctant to carry traffic from others unless they can recover the costs of the additional infrastructure needed to forward it to their own subscribers (remember, the model in much of the world is that the sender of the message pays, the receiver does not - similar to snailmail). As a result, carriers can, and do, block traffic unless they have a specific contract with the originating provider to deal with the cross-charging issue.

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.