I’m from the UK, I work for a company that develops software solutions in all kinds of industries and countries. We have a requirement to develop a solution for a company based in the US which must utilises mobile text messaging, whereby we will send out appointment confirmations from our system to the mobile phone of the person who made the booking.
While speaking to one of our partners, they advise that unlike the UK (and EU) where all the mobile providers agree to handle SMS traffic between each other (for a nominal fee), the mobile providers in the US do not do this and there is no guarantee that a message sent from one mobile provider will reach the recipient on another mobile network.
Seems odd to me, too. I’ve owned phones with Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, and have sent and received SMS texts to/from other service providers over the last 20 years or so. I don’t remember when SMS was first deployed.
I am not a texting or service expert. Just speaking from limited experience.
SMS is SMS; there are no restrictions based on carrier in the US.
However, Alessan is partially right. Text messaging is often paid for by message, and a lot of plans are limited to a certain # of messages for free, after that, you pay a crazy rate per message. I think it’s message received or sent, but that could vary by carrier. There are unlimited messaging plans, but not everyone has those.
Yeah, that’s the big thing. Some people in the US have their carrier block texts altogether or just ignore them (even though you still get charged).
Also, I don’t know how this compares to Europe or if it has anything to do with the multiple carriers issue, but SMS isn’t terribly reliable in the US. Especially in rural areas that might have spotty coverage. You get a lot of texts that get delivered hours late or just disappear entirely.
For that reason, and for the incoming text charges, SMS probably isn’t the best way to handle automated notification in this country, but I’m assuming that’s your client’s problem.
I use Verizon. Texts from certain carriers (AT&T?) seem to always arrive in triplicate, or after significant delay. I’ve heard the same complaint from other Verizon customers.
Plus some states have legal restrictions this type of text messaging, sending it w/o specific permission from the person getting the text can result in some heavy fines. This is to prevent spamming.
In these states texting is an opt in process. A test message is sent, if the customer texts back yes then you can legally send them texts.
Canada is similar telephonically. Originally, the cellphone networks were on dissimilar standards, not all od which supported SMS. About ten years ago there was a lot of crowing when someone implemented an SMS gateway that allowed interstandard SMSing between the different networks. These days, most Canadian networks are converging towards 4G LTE (in the GSM family), and only a few of the smaller discount carriers use CDMA as their primary standard.
SMS messaging is a standard, so there should be no problem with sending texts between carriers, but because not everyone has unlimited texting, you should offer the customers the option of receiving the notification by text or by email.
On the other hand, we also don’t pay twelve dollars (or “euros” or “pounds” as they’re known in European) for a gallon (or “litre,” again, same deal) for gas (“petrol”).
I know from personal experience that I can send SMSs to our embedded devices from AT&T and have them get there, while not having any lucking sending them from my free Pinger account.
But unlimited texts still cost extra don’t they? Last time I checked it was like $20 a month so I’ve always stuck with the cheapest text plan for my smartphones.
Depends on the carrier. The latest Verizon family smartphone plans, for example, give unlimited minutes and unlimited texts and you get charged fees for each device, and for insanely small buckets of data in 1gb increments. No options for less than unlimited minutes or less than unlimited text unless you are grandfathered/still in an old plan, which a lot of people probably are.