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| Edited By: Mayank Tewari |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 11, 2018, 02:12 AM IST
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. “It is common for me to receive an SMS a good four to six hours after they have been sent. It has often landed me in awkward situations,” rues 28-year-old Ashutosh Mehta, a travel operator in Andheri (West), who subscribes to the mobile service offered by a leading telecom operator.
Others find that SMSes have to be followed up with voice calls. “When I know my messages won’t be delivered on time, I have to make calls for small things to my staff.
Sometimes I get the delivery reports of messages I had dispatched the night before the next day,” says Aarti Setia, a fashion stylist. “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,” adds Setia.
What’s wrong? The short answer is that the networks aren’t good enough to handle so much data traffic. With mobile operators adding 14-15 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. Assuming 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, who sell bulk SMS packages to companies to drum up revenues. Since these deals cannot be shortchanged, 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 cell phone 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 users report are essentially delays caused at the level of the SMS service centre - servers maintained by operators to transfer messages,” says Anirudhha Gopal, a telecom consultant. In short, SMSes travel a different route compared to voice and data calls.
When we send a text message, the burst of data is first received by the message centre that 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. SMS being one of the most direct and speedy means of staying in touch, we ensure our SMS server has adequate capacity to handle large usage. Our customers face no delay in delivery of SMSes, except when the recipient is out of the coverage area or the phone is switched off.”
The official spokesperson for Tata Indicom also denied having any problems in their SMS delivery system. 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 a user I feel frustrated,” says Anuja Sharma, a resident of central 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. “I have had this number for four years. I would not like to switch now,” adds Anuja.
