Comments on: University Emergency SMS service doesn’t deliver

By: SMS Text News » Archives » Louisiana State Uni’s text system failure was ‘misunderstanding’

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:38:01 +0000

[...] I had my head in my hands reading this story — ‘geez, not another emergency text service failing to deliver’ — particularly after the news from November that the Connecticut State University text notification system didn’t work. [...]

By: Giff

Giff — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:15:46 +0000

My guess here is they are using one of the “free” open source SMS gateways. These are great sometimes and other times as unreliable as they come. It is sometimes bewildering to us that emergency alert companies choose to use the free gateway and not the carrier approved short codes to send out alerts. Yes it saves money, but test after test just shows it flat out doesn’t work. Go figure!

By: Steve Procter

Steve Procter — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 17:10:58 +0000

I can’t speak for this example, but here in the UK there are a number of large organisations who are planning on sending SMS and they come to the likes of us at iTAGG and many of our peers and basically ask for dirt cheap SMS routes. They are willing to push their SMS traffic through offshore gateways that are, to put it politely “totally unreliable”.

At iTAGG when leads begin asking us to go close to the stupidly low price that they can get from these offshore routes we just say goodbye. Our rates are very competitive but there is a point where it is blindingly obvious that the lead doesn’t really want a reliable route and just wants cheap cheap cheap.

As long as SMS and MMS aggregators like iTAGG and the many other good players stick to their guns and only offer high grade routes then big clients as above should have fewer and fewer problems with delivery success.

steve

By: Al

Al — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:00:34 +0000

I have found that with many gateway providers the throughput to be more like 100/second and some as low as 10/sec. So you have to factor in the source application to loop through the phone numbers and generate the XML string to pass to the API, then the gateway proivder to parse that and send to the relevant carriers and then for them to pass that onto the device. Also, here in the US the carriers are NOT reliable at all, Verizon being the worse offendor for undelivered messages.