When users rant about their wireless carriers, it’s usually associated with spotty coverage or dropped calls, but a new survey suggests dropped texts is a growing problem as well.
The survey, sponsored by Telcordia, revealed 82% of respondents said they’d suffered a dropped SMS or MMS message in the past 12 months. What’s interesting is that the sample size for the study was huge- not a few hundred people as some surveys sample. The respondents represented mobile users in more than 75 countries.
Telcordia, a vendor who “administers industry directories and registries that service providers and aggregators use to deliver voice and data services (including SMS),” thinks the problem lies with number portability, which is amplified across multiple SMS aggregators or hubs that may not have access to the same data about number changes that mobile operators have themselves.
Service providers typically have access to number portability changes within their network, obviously, as well as on a bilateral basis with other carriers, but SMS aggregators and hub providers have less access to such up-to-date data. This, along with the sheer number of messages being sent at any given time, indicate a problem that can only get worse.
