Sometimes an SMS msg reaches me a ½ day or full day late. Sometimes an SMS doesn’t reach me at all. I don’t use SMS often yet there are two recent instances where a friend sent an SMS that somewhat required a reply from me. When we met in person, they told me in detail what the SMS said and I said with 100% confidence that I did not receive the message. My friend was baffled in disbelief… how can this be?
All my friends use smartphones for SMS but I will not. I use a feature phone (aka dumb phone). Smartphones can be updated for bug fixes but also because of that possibility I think there is a culture of writing sloppy code in the first place. The makers also want you to be forced to buy upgrades so bugs are good for that business. Smartphones are also a hell of a lot more complex and complexity is proportional to bugs. My dumb phone cannot be updated but it’s extremely simple & the tech is old thus proven.
Regardless, I did a brief dig & it seems the GSM network is to blame, not the phones. According to tech writer Adam Fendelman, “It’s been shown that around 1-5 percent of all SMS messages are actually lost even when nothing is seemingly wrong”. Yikes. That is terrible.
This article is oriented toward the assholes who spam you with SMS ads. I almost closed the page but then saw a gem therein which gives this reason for some msgs being dropped:
“Flagged as Spam: Sometimes, carriers of recipients may flag your SMS as spam because of the use of certain language, words, or symbols that trigger spam filters.”
Shit; that sucks. So the same thing that makes email less reliable than fax is making SMS less reliable too. I know from my spam boxes with various email providers how crappy the spam/ham separators can be so I actually seek out & favor email providers who have no spam filtering. I had no idea that my SMS msgs would be subject to this. In principle, I might like SMS to be spam-filtered but only if the positives for spam are still made available either by emailing them or giving me a web portal.
Of course SMS can also fail for obvious reasons:
- your phone is off or out of range
- your phone lacks storage (dumb phones run out of memory)
but there is some machinery at work to ensure reattempts.
I am certain that my phone was not out of memory when my friend tried to SMS me. My phone shows me a msg: “incoming msg but memory full” when that happens.
Fendelman’s article also says “SMS is usually lower on the priority list than other traffic like voice.” And worse, there is often no error detection in place so apparently some networks don’t even know when a SMS msg is lost.
The lack of SMS reliability is why the old radio pagers from the 80s have not been completely mothballed. Some cities are wise enough to keep them around for ER docs and firefighters. What about the cities that have not? They just decided SMS is reliable enough for lives to depend on?
I want my 1980s pager back.
This was true of 1980s pocket pagers as well.
The most common pager in the 80s was numeric. You receive only their phone number. Your callback is confirmation of receipt. When you enter an alphanumeric msg (SMS), there is a natural tendency to word it precisely so that a reply is not needed whenever possible, for efficiency.
My dumb phone has a read receipt feature as well as my GSM USB s/w and I use it. I think I only had a few instances where the read receipt did not come back or it came back extremely late, but that particular recipient is also someone who is likely traveling abroad, phone off, etc. So I’m not sure if it’s a reliable mechanism. Perhaps the fact that it came back quite late once suggests that the server waited until he turned on his phone & ensured it was delivered to his phone instead of just to a network server. I should perhaps find out if the person who sends me msgs that get dropped uses a return receipt notification.