Comments on: Why are Google’s SMS services unreliable?

By: Jeremy Toeman

Jeremy Toeman — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 00:33:23 +0000

Good points, but it’s definitely only happening to Google SMS’s…

By: Ron Feldman

Ron Feldman — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 22:08:04 +0000

Unfortunately SMS exists without QoS or SLA guarantees, so that the problem could lie with Google, their messaging aggregator, your carrier, or some combination thereof. All the connection points are highly prone to congestion-related delays and other issues. Long-story short - if you’re relying on receiving notifications to your phone for anything with SMS, expect reliability of about one 9, not five 9s…….

By: Rakesh Agrawal

Rakesh Agrawal — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:55:38 +0000

It’s likely a problem with your cell carrier. I’ve observed delay problems with my carrier (AT&T) when trying to send SMSs to another AT&T cell number. I get SMS notifications with Google Calendar and I’m still on AT&T and I haven’t noticed the delays be that bad — rather than 10 minutes before a meeting, the worst I’ve noticed in the past few weeks is a notification that was delayed by 3 minutes (ie 7 minutes ahead of my meeting). You might want to talk to other people using the same carrier as you? Do you use SMS otherwise and have you seen slowdowns in your non-Google SMSs?

By: tivoboy

tivoboy — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 02:37:29 +0000

I use a product for calendering called timebridge, it links with not only my calenders (yes, outlook from the borg) and google calender, Ical on my mac, but OTHER peoples calenders. I have my cell phone setup to get SMS messages via their email portal.