SMSes slower than Shatabdi

SMSes are no longer what they used to be: instant, short messages delivered quickly to people who you’d rather send a text message to instead of calling. Many devotees of the mobile phone have discovered that often there’s nothing instant about an SMS.

“One important use of SMSes for me was when someone was busy on the phone and I could not get through, I would usually send a message. However, with the delay in delivery, it is pointless sending SMSes. I would rather wait and call again,” rues 28-year-old Ankur Singhal, a city-based financial consultant.

Others find that SMSes have to be followed up with voice calls. “I would often use a template SMS, but at times I keep getting calls after calls from the same person as the message would not reach the caller,” said Ritu Sarin, who works with a leading hospitality firm.

“The standard reply of the customer-care centre (of the operator) is that sometimes messages can take a while to get delivered and there is nothing anyone can do about it,” she said.

What’s wrong? The short answer is that the networks aren’t good enough to handle so much data traffic. With operators adding 15 million subscribers every month, the quality of service, especially in the big metros like Mumbai and Delhi, becomes poorer. As at the end of August, there were 457 million mobile subscribers in India. Assuming that each subscriber sends only one SMS on an average every day, that’s half a billion messages clogging the networks.

Compounding matters is the marketing pitch of telecom operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Tata Indicom and BSNL, which sell bulk SMS packages to companies to drum up revenues. Since these deals cannot be short-changed, one possibility is that the operators are squeezing SMS services to individuals rather than the big corporate customers.

An SMS piggybacks on the bandwidth allotted to out-of-band signalling — which is the segment used to maintain a communication link between the cellphone and the mobile tower. In fact, SMSes have to be short precisely because they can’t use additional bandwidth resources.

“At the network level, technically speaking, an SMS cannot be delayed. The delays that users report are essentially delays caused at the level of the SMS service centre — servers maintained by operators to transfer messages,” said Anirudhha Gopal, a Mumbai-based telecom consultant. In short, SMSes travel by a different route from voice and data calls.

When we send a text message, the burst of data is first received by the message centre, which stores it. It is then forwarded to the recipient. Any delay in receiving a text message implies that the message is stuck with the messaging centre.

Mobile operators deny any such problem. An Airtel official spokesperson said: “Bharti Airtel is committed to providing customers a world-class service experience. SMSes forming one of the most direct and speedy means of staying in touch, we ensure that our SMS server has adequate capacity to handle large usage. Our customers face no delay in SMS delivery, except when the recipient is out of the coverage area or the phone is switched off.”

Balesh Sharma, CEO of Vodafone Gujarat, said, “We have sufficient capacity to handle the traffic. So much so that even on peak days like New Year or Friendship Day, our subscribers’ messages are delivered on time. I personally monitor most customer complaints and we have not been receiving complaints to this effect either.”

An official of Reliance Communication, which provides both CDMA as well as GSM services in Gujarat, too claimed that no such complaints were coming in. “Only on special occasions could this happen. The SMSes may take a little more time than usual. But even in this case, the delay is not as long as four hours.”

The official spokesperson for Tata Indicom in Mumbai denied having any problems in their SMS delivery. Emails sent to Vodafone requesting comments were not answered. But users know that something is wrong. “My inbox is flooded with promotional and marketing messages, but I cannot seem to get the important ones on time. As I user, I feel frustrated,” said Anuja Sharma, a resident of Mumbai, who works in the business district of Nariman Point.

A number of mobile users DNA spoke to said that they would like to switch operators to see if the competition was any better. But they are waiting for mobile number portability to come into effect.

(Mayank Tewari from Mumbai contributed to this story)