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Last Words
Phones lose millions of text messages
By CNN via Reuters
15/12/2002
CHICAGO, Illinois -- Millions of short text messages sent between mobile phones in the United States are lost every month, and the chance of two parties connecting depends on which networks they use, a study released Wednesday says.
Internet performance measurement company Keynote Systems Inc. says in its study that 7.5 percent of all short text messages sent between wireless telephone companies are lost.
The increasingly popular service known as SMS (Short Message Service) allows mobile phone users to send brief messages instantaneously to their friends and family. It typically costs 10 cents to send a message and pennies to nothing to receive one.
Use growing in the United States
In Europe, where it is also known as "text messaging," 10 to 15 percent of wireless operators' revenue comes from SMS, but adoption of the service has been slower in the United States, where users were not able to send messages to networks other than their own until last year.
Still, industry group Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association estimates that nearly one billion messages were exchanged during the month of June 2002, the latest figure it has. At a lost-message rate of 7.5 percent, this means millions of messages never reach the intended recipient.
Chuck Mount, general manager of Keynote's Wireless Perspective Service, said a significant lost-message rate will not only affect carriers' revenue but could affect customer usage of the still budding service.
How companies fared
Among the operators, the third-largest U.S. wireless operator AT&T Wireless Services Inc. had the highest success rate in sending and receiving messages.
It was the top performer in terms of messages sent to users on other networks as well as messages sent within its network at 95.5 percent and 97.8 percent, respectively.
While rival Verizon Wireless , the largest wireless operator, scored the highest in terms of receiving messages at a 95 percent rate, AT&T Wireless trailed the largest wireless operator by only 0.2 percent.
T-Mobile USA, the sixth-largest wireless operator, was one of the worst performers. Only 86 percent of messages sent from a T-Mobile phone to a user on another network and 87 percent of messages sent to another T-Mobile phone were successfully received.
The Deutsche Telekom unit received 92 percent of messages sent from other networks.
Keynote said it test-sent nearly 26,000 messages in cities around the country over a period of two weeks in December as part of the study.
The full article appeared at CNN
Links:
Keynote press release
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