The first social network for the base of the pyramid

How reliable is SMS

Since so many BOP initiatives rely on mobile phones and SMS in particular, does anyone know how reliable SMS is across developing countries and what factors they depend on? I'm trying to build a system in Nepal and I'm finding that delays can range from 10 seconds up to a few hours. Sometimes (although rarely) the SMS is delivered a whole day later. I'm using Clickatell and they're getting good reviews so I'm not sure if it's them or Nepal Telecom that's causing the delays.

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Permalink Reply by Mark Aldiss on December 9, 2008 at 5:34pm: I live in Wales in the UK and use Vodafone Pay As You Talk - there are many times when SMS messages take as long as you are talking about to just go a few miles (-: Most of the time messages get through as they were sent but occasionally a message will be split into sections and the last section never arrives. 98% of the time SMS gets there - not always on time though... most of us in this area set our phones to give us a delivery report when the message lands on the recipients phone - always taking it for granted that that doesn't mean the message has been read!

I think it is the university of Berkely in California who research how much data and how effective the systems for handling that data ... ( http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/ ) but actually thinking about it, I am not sure who is measuring and publishing times for delivery ( http://www.anacom.pt/render.jsp?contentId=710075 ) possibly the International Telecommunications Union? Or a request from everyone attached to bopsource to record the times of their sms'...?

(-:

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Permalink Reply by Anand Sheombar on December 14, 2008 at 4:05am: Hi Akshay,

You might find the following resources useful:

http://lirneasia.net/
LIRNEasia is a regional information and communication technology (ICT) policy and regulation capacity-building organization active across the Asia Pacific.

I guess more about quality of service of sms / text messaging can be found via the ITU site (http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/links/) , they have a link to the Nepales telecommnunications authority for QoS parameters and periodical performance reports at http://www.nta.gov.np/miscellaneous.html; ▶ Reply to This