QOS request

We are often asked questions like "could you please provide to me the end to end Quality of Service parameters for the SMS with the bench mark for each parameter."

Our response

This is a very reasonable request but there is some difficulty in giving the type of answer that could reasonably be expected.

The problem is that Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) will give absolutely no guarantees about delivery of SMS messages. All our contracts with MNOs offer to use their "best endeavours" to deliver messages and all have several "escape clauses" relating to infrastructure problems and matters beyond their control. The net effect of this is that they, and thus we, give no guarantees at all that any message will be delivered let alone in a timely fashion. Problems which may impact delivery include simple things like the person having their phone switched off, being out of range for example underground or their phone's memory being full. On one occasion a major European MNO was unable to delivered messages for 12 hours when a JCB tractor cut through all the fibre cables feeding their main switching center.

Having said that I can explain what we do to maximize the chance that messages will be delivered. We use multiple Tier One carriers - i.e. companies like O2, Vodafone and MTN. We also use several high quality aggregators to help us deliver messages into North America, South America, the Middle East, Far East and Africa. These aggregators supplement our own direct connections. We monitor the ability of each route to deliver to each network and dynamically fail-over to an alternative route on a message by message basis. We do not use cheap African and Far Eastern suppliers of dubious quality to deliver Premier Service traffic.

As a result you can expect messages to be delivered anywhere in the world in under 15 seconds - though you will find on a few occasions that it may take 30 seconds or more depending on the state of the MNOs delivery network in the target country.

Providing metrics is further complicated by the fact that most MNOs provide Delivery Receipts only to the nearest minute. As a result a message that we send at 19:24:45 may well be reported delivered at 19:24:00 - 45 seconds before we offer it. In addition about 10% to 15% of messages seem to be delayed because the user is out of range of a Network and as a result a proportion of messages do net get delivered for several hours. Having said that if you try the system to a phone that you know is working you will find that delivery is very fast - within a few seconds.

I believe that we are unique in publishing life traffic quality statistics and you can see these at http://www.csoft.co.uk/performance. The second graph indicates if we have any delivery problems.

In addition we provide detailed historical information about every message that passes through our system and you can see, for nearly all networks, whether or not the message arrived on the phone and the date and time at which it arrived on the phone. The exception to this is the USA where most networks do not make that information available to us.

We are confident that you will not get a better response than this from any other supplier: and if you do, then I suggest that you treat it with a great deal of skepticism!

Please do not hesitate to ask for further information or clarification on this important issue.