On 5/20/07, Matt McLeod <m...@boggle.org> wrote:
SMS is unreliable the way UDP or email is unreliable.
Um, aren't those two completely different classes of unreliability? Email is unreliable due to shitty implementations of a reliable protocol, whereas UDP is unreliable by design. (Unless this definition of "unreliable" also includes "no guarantee of immediate delivery", which would cover email)
Mostly it works but there's no guarantee. I wouldn't use it for critical alert systems unless the alternatives were even worse, which AFAIK is not the case in my particular part of the world.
I have heard of parts of America where it's used to send missions to air ambulance crews. I heard this from someone who was, at the time, a sysadmin for the telco which was providing the SMS network for these ambulances, which they had no idea about until they accidentally saw some of the messages queued during an accidental downtime. They put a little more effort into their downtime response after that. -- Yoz
