SMS is unreliable (1—5% msgs lost inexplicably). 1980s pagers are more reliable.
SMS is unreliable (1—5% msgs lost inexplicably). 1980s pagers are more reliable.
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.
I recently retired from the local volunteer fire and rescue service. Several years ago the 911 dispatch service wanted to drop paging for notifications and move to SMS. I wrote a nice little technical critique of that plan. In addition to the basic issues regarding coverage (many members have no cell service in their yards, never mind in the fields, yet pagers basically just work), I learned from my technical contacts at the telco that there were a number of service guarantee problems. In addition to the lost and delayed message problem you discovered, things only get worse when crossing providers. As he put it, it's not so much that it works so good most of the time, it's that it works at all.
Dispatch did go with SMS notifications, but as an add-on to pagers and "robocalls" to registered phone numbers. We tracked notification channels for several months and found that with every callout, at least one member would report getting the SMS at least 20 minutes later than the page or phone call. Note that most members can get to the hall in 20 minutes or less. A couple of times over the years, we got a flurry of SMS notifications after we were on scene.
Friends don't let friends use SMS for urgent or critical communications.
I would love to get back to a radio pager. But there are a few hurdles:
- Radio pagers are no longer manufactured so you have to build one or scrounge the 2nd hand market
- Service has shrunk and there is a duopoly in the US. So the price of service is a bit high and you must sign a 1 year contract (non-starter for nomads)
- You can overcome the service cost by getting a ham license & a #POCSAG pager. But privacy is toast because encryption is illegal over the amateur radio bands. Hobbyists log the pager msgs and even publish the logs online.
And worse, there is often no error detection in place so apparently some networks don’t even know when a SMS msg is lost.
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.
Why are you still using SMS to communicate in this day and age? Does your feature phone not have any internet communication options?
You might think lack of updates is a good thing, and while you're protected against planned obsolescence and bad updates you also get no bug fixes and no security updates.
Using SMS is terrible for security/privacy, you've already discovered yourself that your messages could be intercepted and marked as spam by some unknown middleman!
For myself, I still use SMS a lot.
The lack of interoperable messengers means that dropping SMS requires installing 3 or 4 different messaging apps, one of which I can't install because I use Android. So it's Signal for 3 or 4 people, SMS for everyone else. Quite a few of those "everyone else" people were willing to use Signal as their "everyone else" app, but dropped it when Signal dropped SMS support. It seems people are willing to use a primary app and a secondary app, but not 3 or more.
In my world, SMS won't go away until someone develops an open protocol that everyone adopts in an interoperable way.
I would suggest looking for a replacement for #Signal:
https://github.com/privacytools/privacytools.io/issues/779
at least for your more advanced folks, if they can handle some of the quirks/glitches of XMPP & OMEMO.
I will not email recipients whose email is hosted by a surveillance capitalist (Google, MS) for a couple reasons: both Google & MS have broken email by dictating which IPs may connect to their service. They exclude me arbitrarily for having a residential IP. The official reason is bullshit. The real reason the corporate bottom line: to force everyone to relay their mail through a provider who GAFAM likes & ultimately ensure they get their eyes on as many msgs as possible. I will not feed them. So I do an MX lookup on the recipient’s email address and probably 90+% of the time it’s GAFAM. And when it’s not GAFAM, there is still a ~70% chance that the other server has conformed to Google’s variety of exclusivity (#SpamHaus, etc). The same recipients who use GAFAM for email don’t intersect with those competent enough to use PGP. So it’s a shit show of piss poor privacy, ethics, & plain old walled garden exclusion.
With email mostly canceled for me, I insist on people close to me using Wire or XMPP+OMEMO. For a few hold outs I use SMS, which is less of a disclosure abuse risk than GAFAM-hosted email.
Just wait till you find out the reliability of faxes and subsequently find out how much of the medical profession relies on them.
Glad to hear it. This inspired me to post Why fax is more reliable than email.
And indeed email is mostly dead to me. I’ve gone back to fax and snail-mail for the most part. Between the two I rely more heavily on snail-mail because lately faxes are downgraded by having email in the loop anyway. OTOH, the fax service → email segment is likely much more reliable than the email → email segment so it’s almost a toss up. I’ll often send a fax if it’s gratis and the sensitivity is not at a level where I’m worried that MS & Google will OCR it for their exploitation.