The Case of the Missing SMS Messages


How many times have you sent an SMS message, only to later on discover that the other party has never received it?

“Yeah, lots of times,” you say. “Big deal.”

But it is a big deal. And that’s the problem.

Unlike voice calls, which give us instant feedback as to whether or not the other party is actually receiving our call, text messages do not give us any feedback facility. And the only way we’ll know whether or not the other party has received our SMS message is if he or she actually replies… often with a curt “K.” Which still costs a buck.

Here’s the problem. Telecoms will charge you for messages that you send, regardless of whether or not the other party actually receives these. I guess they were following the post office model, where you pay for your mail whether or not they actually get received.

Fine, I’ll accept that. But what I have a problem with is that unlike the postal service, which eventually informs me whether or not my mail has been received, my telecom refuses to inform me. So if I text my neighbor that his house is on fire, I have no way of knowing whether or not he actually received my message, short of him replying with a curt “K.”

There was a time, circa 1997, when mobile phones came with a text confirmation option that let you know when your text was actually received by the other party. So back then, when I sent a text message with my ancient Nokia 3810, I could receive an SMS that let me know when the other party has actually received my message.

But my telecom service soon stopped supporting this feature, perhaps to save on SMS bandwidth. And phone-makers soon completely forgot about text confirmation as well.

Here’s my take. If my text message expires without ever reaching its destination, then it’s my telecom’s moral obligation to inform me so. Otherwise, I will be forever in the dark as to whether or not people are actually receiving my messages or are just ignoring me (like they usually do). That should be the least that they can do for me for my one peso!

Because if they can’t do this for me, then my next recourse is to demand my money back everytime a message doesn’t reach its destination. Like the time I composed an 11-part SMS novella and it was never received, darn it. I want my eleven pesos back.

And as for the rest of us text-consuming populace, we all have to learn to put our collective foot down and stop letting telecoms get away with this travesty of justice. If we suspect that our messages are not getting received, then let’s demand our money back! Let’s not let them get away with the presumption that we’re too laid back to complain about unreceived messages. Because it is a big deal.

Me? I’m gonna demand for my eleven pesos back…

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March 24th, 2006
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Comment Number:
1
Written by:
Jayvee Fernandez
Posted on:
3/25/2006 at 3:05 pm

most phones now come with a “delivery receipt” option which you can turn on and off in the options. thing is, it gets reallllly annoying to always receive a receipt after every sms - you actually take it for granted and it wont serve the purpose of reminding you whether your msg was sent or not.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Charo Nuguid
Posted on:
3/26/2006 at 10:04 am

Jayvee Fernandez Says:
most phones now come with a “delivery receipt” option which you can turn on and off in the options.

The delivery receipt is dependent though. On my end, this works for intra-telco sending. But for inter-telco sending, the chances of getting a delivery receipt turn to 50/50.

Once upon a time, sending SMS and MMS is better since you have a history of your conversation. But thanks to today’s mobile phones, if the communications are really important I can just call up the party and record the conversation for playback later. It’s more expensive than sending SMS/MMS, but at least you don’t have to wait 1/2 an hour for a reply. PLUS you get the added feature of cooly saying “Would you like to hear our previous conversations or would you like to talk to my lawyer instead?”

:D

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
Jones Kingsu
Posted on:
3/27/2006 at 8:18 am

umm… that’s why you call if there’s an emergency rather than sending an SMS.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
Roger D
Posted on:
3/27/2006 at 9:01 am

hah! this is peanuts. have you experienced sending only one SMS to someone and later found out that the recipient receives it several times and you got charged several times too. it happened to me.

Comment Number:
5
Written by:
Lawrence
Posted on:
3/27/2006 at 1:27 pm

Another issue of concern is number portability. I want to be able to retain my number regardless if I switch from globe to smart to addict to talkntext. I wouldn’t want to send all the 400 people in my addressbook notifications of my new number everytime I switch network provider.

Comment Number:
6
Written by:
Charo Nuguid
Posted on:
3/27/2006 at 1:38 pm

Roger D Says:
hah! this is peanuts. have you experienced sending only one SMS to someone and later found out that the recipient receives it several times and you got charged several times too. it happened to me.

Ah! That one is even worse than the mixed texts! Happened to me several times wherein through out the day 4 or 5 of my messages will be received 5 or 6 times each! GAH! The weird part was it only happens when I text Art. O_o;; Doesn’t happen with any of my other friends. As to receiving multiples, again, it only happens when Art sends them. (Maybe that’s the problem?!) Whatever…

What I’d usually do is turn of the phone, wait a few minutes then turn it on again. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But man! I’m sure you could imagine the havoc on the billing statement!

All this disappeared though when I got a new phone. Which brings me to the question: Maybe it’s really the phone’s fault in the case of the multiple SMS copies?

Comment Number:
7
Written by:
BernieJ
Posted on:
3/27/2006 at 4:03 pm

I’ll leave you guys with this mantra:

“If its important, don’t text; CALL!”

Especially now that Globe has this 10 centavos per second charging, it may end up cheaper to do a 10 second voice call (costing a measly Php 1.12 — RVAT included) than to pull out your hair in frustration due to unreceived SMS.

Comment Number:
8
Written by:
Migs
Posted on:
3/29/2006 at 6:48 pm

Maybe we should switch to mobile IM

Comment Number:
9
Written by:
Charo Nuguid
Posted on:
3/31/2006 at 1:05 pm

Migs Says:
Maybe we should switch to mobile IM

I’ve recently signed on to http://www.yamigo.com and using my MSN and Yahoo accounts. If you have a Sony Ericsson phone, you should be able to use the “My Friends” feature. Nokia series 60 and 40 phones as well as Motorala units are also supported.

All I need now is a test to see how it fares when someone is using Yahoo or MSN Messenger to contact me on my phone.

Comment Number:
10
Written by:
boris
Posted on:
3/31/2006 at 1:16 pm

Telcos in the Middle East does send you a msg saying that your msg has been received by the other party you’re texting. However, the best thing about this is that the confirmation msg is not like the standard SMS that you receive, instead, it suddenly pops out and you just have the option to click OK if you wanna delete it. I use a Nokia 6510 for this feature. It does work too with other Series 40 models.

Comment Number:
11
Written by:
Allan
Posted on:
3/31/2006 at 7:41 pm

missing text and duplicated messages are all the same, the consumer is being cheated. Text messaging is the easiest way to cheat the customer because there are no actual logs of the text messages we send out, unlike in vocie calls which we can check. Thus, we can never really verify whether or not it is the correct amount of text we are being charged for.

On another note, if it is indeed important, just call. Globe should make their 10 centavos per second permanent. This is more consumer-friendly since the consumer will be billed more accruately for the amount he/she uses on the the telephone.

With so many advancements and changes with regards to voice calling and 3G, mobile telephone companies should also pay attention to the lack-luster service they are providing with regards to text messaging.

Comment Number:
12
Written by:
Roger D
Posted on:
4/3/2006 at 3:11 pm

migs, charo you can checkout www.yehba.com pinoy Mobile IM, guys, you may wanna try it. free to download.

thanks,

Comment Number:
13
Written by:
godie
Posted on:
4/8/2006 at 8:42 am

This is old news but since its on the front page…

First, lets look first what is SMS, it was originally designed as means or sending short message of low priority but people has became accustomed to using SMS for all types of communication that the telco started charging prime cost for it (most international carriers dont charge you for SMS service as part of the subscription plan).

Secondly, lets look at how this problems came to be. The telcos were upgrading their system at that time, most of it was facilitate better consolication of billing for VAS (SPCC and CSP) as well as upgrades on network in preparation for G3 (UTMS and CDMA20001XRTT).

If you dont understand much of these terms then don’t worry, its just like when you changed OS from Win98 to Windows XP and found out most of your applications don’t run on WinXP :))

The upgrade also came at a bad time because SUN released their text-buffets which prompted SMART and GLOBE to come up with the same strategy in a short time. I personally thought SUN took that opputunity to take some subscriber share from the other two telco — which worked. After two telcos launched their own text-buffet, the quality of service dropped drastically because they were really unprepared for that.

So far our telcos did fine after that except sometimes SMS exchange is distrupted thus there was one time a large portion of the city can send and receive to provincial areas or the messages reached the recepient a day after.

Anyway if your interested you may try txtmokko.com which allows you to receive SMS via a keyword of your choice, great for keeping your number anonymous and it comes with message forwarding to web, email, and IM. Best part is you can reply via web for free.

You try it, if you wish to send me a message just compose and SMS with the following pattern:

MSG GODIE “replace this qouted sentence with your message”

then send to 2948 for Globe/Sun and 3940 for Smart/TM with standard VAS rate.

I been using this for 2 months, and its great. I even printed it on my calling card and atleast i’ll be sure im going to receive always important message with no duplicates :)