I don't know about carriers other than Verizon and AT&T, but in general the email-to-SMS gateways have no SLA and are treated as consumer products. So you can't really depend on them. On the other hand, paging is a rapidly consolidating and diminishing business, so I wouldn't depend on those being around forever or even as reliable as they are now, at some point in the future.
AT&T: @txt.att.net is AT&T's consumer class product, no SLA. AT&T also offers an enterprise class service @page.att.net, that comes with an SLA. They also offer an MMS service, if the typical SMS message size is too small for your needs. I use the @page.att.net service (I believe it is an extra $5/month) and have found it more reliable and seems to have lower latency than the @txt.att.net service. No idea whether there is better/different infrastructure that gives them the guts to provide an SLA, or whether things are better monitored. I suspect the platform is the same, based on bits of information I've been exposed to. Verizon: When I was a Verizon customer I had no major issues with them. And remember, many times SMS messages will make it through where you can't even make a voice call. Sometimes the opposite. Many variables involved. But generally Verizon was pretty good. I guess it all boils down to how mission critical it is that you be paged *right now*. HTH, Dave On 3/17/10 3:39 PM, Brian O'Neill wrote: > We still use pagers as well (USA Mobility or whatever they are called > this week). I think we'd love to drop them, but we've still found SMS to > be unreliable in terms of speed of delivery. Sometimes we'll still get > the SMS hours later, and not for want of signal (the phone can have full > signal, and not be moving for hours, and the message will come at 3am > when it was sent at 6pm...) > > I've been trying to talk the guy who pays for the cell phones to get me > a Droid to see about a way to poll for critical messages from multiple > sources... _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
