SMS Messaging Unreliable 551
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?"
Having worked in the WAP world (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but you're told (Score:5, Interesting)
--
D
"CSLib Menace strikes back"
SMSC (Score:5, Interesting)
And i use a SMS chat system where I receive around 100 messages per day...
Failure Rate (Score:2, Interesting)
Not my experience (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
You know, maybe someone just caught on. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
SMS: intrusive and an invitation to spammers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Verizon won an anti-spam lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [internetnews.com]
I love Verizon Wireless.
Re:Failure Rate (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
SMS is Monty Python humour (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Time limit (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:IN THE USA (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
No problems in New Zealand (Score:5, Interesting)
Telecom NZ uses CDMA an D-AMPS and I haven't heard of any losses on that side at all.
My experience with Sprint (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Depends a *lot* on provider (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
What about voicemails? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:'Bout time someone noticed this (Score:2, Interesting)
AT&T and Nextel (Score:2, Interesting)
How about delayed? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Verizon Wireless User (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:When I lived in Europe... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Think different (tm) (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:IN THE USA (Score:2, Interesting)
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 [nttdocomo.co.jp] to see what your missing.
Re:SMS: intrusive and an invitation to spammers (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't carry a pager. Hell, I don't even use my home line for voice (just for fax/'net). People SMS me either through free/paid gateways, ICQ or their phones.
I find SMS is incredibly convenient for sending messages to people when I don't think it's important enough to interrupt what they're doing. It's also something you can do while doing something else (you know, touch type a message in english while talking in spanish to someone - lots of fun - you should try - even better if you're driving at the same time *larf*)
Unless it's real urgent that I speak to someone, I'll text them. I send more SMS than I make calls - go figga...
So yeah, SMS is incredibly useful for lots of reasons. Still, I would imagine if you paid to receive them (what a joke) and already had pager, etc - it might not be so useful...
Re:SMS: intrusive and an invitation to spammers (Score:2, Interesting)
that's friggin great service! (Score:2, Interesting)
WAP utility (Score:3, Interesting)
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.