72 Percent International SMS Delivery Rate in Worldwide Test

Over the years Mob4Hire has had many customers approach us about the issue of SMS testing.

We heard questions like:

                 Are the SMS’s I am sending making it to my end customer? 

                 How long did it take to get to my customer? ( Latency will be an issue with new LBS ad campaigns)

                Was the SMS received the same as the SMS message we sent? ( there can be issues with characters such as accents etc.)


Mob4Hire collaborated with our customers and came up with Mob4Hire SMS Lab. It is an automatic system that tracks delivery of coded SMS messages to our testers worldwide.

We were curious… 


Within the last 3 months, We tested a few providers of SMS on our system.


We tested to 90 carriers in 58 countries worldwide. We used a carrier, a worldwide online SMS chat system and a SMS provider via their API. We only tested 3, and there are thousands of carriers, SMS chat providers and SMS providers around the world, but we think these are representative of typical SMS use cases.

These services were not free services. In every case we waited up to 3 days for results to come in.


The results are below, and surprised us. 


                              Sent via          Worldwide         SMS Provider 
                              Carrier            SMS Chat           via API
                              (PtoP)              System              (AtoP) 
                                                       (AtoP)

Number of             133                  133                   133
SMS Sent

Number of              78                   103                   107
SMS      
Received

Percentage            58.9%               77.4%               80.5%
Received


Total Percentage received by all 3 methods - 72.2%

 Notes:

 1. test results are only shown where at least one SMS was received by a tester (ie there were more testers shown that did not receive a SMS at all)

 2. all SMS were sent within 5 minutes of each other

3. of the 133 testers, 41 received all 3 SMS sent (31 percent)

4. of the 133 testers, 70 received 2 of 3 sent (53 percent)

5. of the 133 testers, 22 received 1 of 3 sent (16 percent)



 We believe that SMS is one the most effective ways of getting to customers.

 We are not the only ones.

https://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v29/v29-132.pdf

http://www.advicehow.com/why-sms-marketing-is-so-effective/ 

http://www.utalkmarketing.com/pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=23150



But…. If SMS is critical, what assurance is there that the SMS was delivered? 




The Mob4Hire SMS Lab system tests mobile SMS functionality over a wide range of networks. Clients (those who wish to test SMS functionality) can access the mob4hire service through an API to launch tests and gather results. Details on the delivery success / failure are tracked. The results of the tests are collated and made available to clients.

API documentation is available at http://developer.mob4hire.com


What do you think? Let us know with your comments.

If you want more information, please contact us at bd@mob4hire.com