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.
Lol. That’s never going to happen. Most of the people I communicate with can barely wrap their heads around the fact that SMS doesn’t require “WiFi” (their name for internet).
For myself, I’ve looked at some of the other systems, but decided that there’s no point since I’d be alone. :)
For the relatively low tech crowd including elderly folks, #Wire is the best answer IMO. It’s a drop-in replacement for #Signal.
The overplayed criticism of Wire is that metadata is insecure. But when it comes to family it’s not really a big reveal in the whole of things. Wire is more inclusive than Signal and the Wire project is more welcoming of a free world than Signal.
XMPP may be user friendly enough if everyone in the group uses #Snikket. The significant glitches only tend to emerge when different client apps are used.
One of the people I SMS with said he would be open to using Signal (and that seemed like a huge concession of his philosophy, as he thinks if you encrypt stuff you invite attention [this is exactly what mass surveillance proponents want you to think]). I refused because I will not share a my phone number with Signal. I distrust their competency to protect the number & also have a problem with the elitism they push by excluding people without mobile phones.
Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve been using Signal since the TextSecure days. In all that time, I’ve been able to move very few people off of whatever came pre-installed.
I looked at Wire when it came out and decided that any gains were not worth the hassle of getting people to move. The fundamentals of switching costs haven’t changed. That is why so many people who rail against Facebook and Twitter still use them.
Indeed resistance to change is sadly why the masses cling to the worst options. It really takes a spark of outrage to motivate people. Musk buying Twitter wasn’t enough… it has to be Musk doing enough bullying to reach the staw that breaks the camel’s back.
Whenever a surge of refugees join the fedi, it’s never because of widespread realization of superior tech. It’s always out of rage over some bad event that drives people over.