eComm – Are SMS reliable?

Here's a great example that happened to me today: I SMSed a colleague about a meeting we were both attending. He was late and I SMSed to remind him. I didn't get his response until about 15 or 20 minutes AFTER he joined the call. Note that having that long of a delay is fairly unusual, but it does happen from time to time. Both of us are on AT&T, albeit in different parts of the country.

A few years ago on T-Mobile, back when they were delivering voicemail notifications as SMS, I stopped using T-Mobile because their voicemail notifications were unreliable. This is the CARRIER sending me an SMS and that didn't work reliably.

Blaine, thank you for sharing your point of view here. I think that reliability of SMS in italy is evident, as well as in any other part of Europe (to my knowledge, in any EU contry), even for country to country SMS traffic. But, I agree with you, I already noticed that it is much different in the US. In particular if you have to connect to global wholesale SMS providers that use don't use the most reliable channels to deliver them. But, I can assure you, SMS has been and still is one of the biggest success in Europe in the field of mobile communications. Ciao

I don't have strong data on European SMS reliability (one of the problems of having localized networks is that there's no way for me to verifiably test our delivery as a small San Francisco based company), but even though we receive delivery reports, we have a number of users who indicate issues. http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/nolon... is a group of people whose phones do not reliably send us delivery reports.

If carriers that charge billions of dollars per year can't get delivery reports right, then SMS is massive fail as far as I'm concerned. In the US, the reliability is provably bad, and I have often experienced (1) complete network outages (which is a complete failure of SMS) and (2) intermittent SMS delivery droppage, both from Twitter and other people *on the same network* as my phone.

We do our best to ensure reliability, but it's only as good as the weakest link. SMS is reliable only because failure is tolerated and human level retry is low-cost. For automated systems where retries and unreliability are unacceptable, SMS is a major problem.

b.

Great to see some live posts from eComm while I am not there. I do enjoy greatly the crowd at eComm, but do be sure to check for hallucinogens in the environment. Or it may be, as we say in the US, that you may be misremembering. (I or someone can explain that for you.) There may be a context in which this is true while for most users in the world SMS has to be the most common reliable messaging. I am missing breathing in that rarified air. Realize you may benefit from this during your presentation so feel free to be in the spirit.

Luca, agreed. Personal SMS use (Europe only?) is very reliable, notable exception New Year's Eve. Bulk SMS, i.e. sent from application and purchased from some providers may very well be a different story. In NL providers ask a surcharge of 10s of percents to allow delivery verification.