SMS delivery mess

We hear a lot from the North American operators about the growth they are experiencing in text messaging. At year-end 2007, AT&T reported that its customers had sent more than 32 billion text messages and 496 million MMS messages. Verizon Wireless, meanwhile, said that its customers had sent or received nearly 45 billion text messages and 927 million picture/video messages.

Clearly SMS is an integral part of the growing data traffic on the operator networks. Plus many content companies rely upon SMS as a delivery mechanism for their content.

But all is not well in SMS, particularly when it comes to timely delivery of messages. I recently spoke with Damien Sazama, vice president of marketing and product development at Interop Technologies, about SMS delivery issues. Interop has authored a white paper on the subject and is trying to drum up industry awareness and figure out a way to resolve the problems.

Sazama says there are still glitches in the SMS mechanism that tend to occur in a couple of instances. For example, when a customer on one network sends a text message to a customer on another network, that text message may be handed off to a different gateway provider. Not all the gateway providers update their information at the same time and so sometimes a message can be delayed or not delivered.

SMS problems also happen when a customer has ported their number to another carrier. The FCC requires that the number be ported within a couple of hours so that the customer's voice calls are directed to the appropriate carrier. However, on the text side, there isn't the same requirement. That means the customer that recently ported their number may not receive text messages promptly or sometimes at all. 

All operators experience these problems with SMS, but for the smaller operators they are amplified because, according to Sazama, 80 percent or more of new activations for small operators are port-ins--meaning new customers are porting their numbers to small carriers.

Sazama says there isn't any one company at fault. The SMS glitches are primarily a result of there being no standards or best practices put in place. Of course, Interop does have a vested interest in getting these issues resolved. As an SMSC provider, they often get blamed when the messages aren't delivered correctly or promptly.

I think the industry should develop best practices for SMS delivery and make sure that messages aren't delayed or dropped. This is a quality of service issue that should be (and can be) resolved. -Sue