We ran a test of Alert Carolina recently and have some real world SMS delivery numbers that I think are worth a post. We sent a little over 24,000 messages in slightly more than 7 minutes. A key metric in that is that we sent almost 80% of the messages by the second minute and many had already begun to arrive on user’s phones. By 5 minutes, 97% of our registered users had messages on the way to them and a large portion of our campus had likely already received the message.
In a real world campus emergency situation, these are excellent numbers. I have long said we don’t need to reach everyone in a classroom or on campus, just enough people so that they can notify others. We already know that students are going to tell other students what is going on much quicker than we can. If we can start that process with good information we are more able to do an effective job of keeping our campus informed.
From a technical standpoint, it is interesting to dive into some of the numbers in order to get a better understanding of the way SMS messaging, in particular large scale messaging, is handled. The first pass at delivery to all of our registered users took just under 2 minutes. As the aggregators sent back information on those delivery attempts, our vendor’s system began to retry delivery or use alternative delivery mechanisms (for example SMTP versus the initial SMPP push) and continued that until we had sent all of the alerts. Almost all of our messages were sent via SMPP, probably because smaller 3rd tier carriers are not very common among our registered users and therefore we have SMPP pipes available to us.
I think this outlines the complexity involved in getting good SMS delivery. After all, we are using / abusing a technology that wasn’t really designed to do what we are asking it to do and still managing to get really good rates of delivery. The key in this is working with a messaging vendor who deeply understands the issues and the limitations and has invested in appropriate redundancies, pathways and carrier relationships.
This is far different than the post Virginia Tech sales opportunity extravaganza that took place as small companies with untested and unknown systems infrastructure made quick sales to lots of different Universities and other organizations. Despite its limitations, SMS alerting is going to be around for some time and we have to treat it like an enterprise application and invest in the right kinds of partnerships.
Tags: alerts, emergency notification, sms
thanks a lot for sharing such a good list of forums…..
Have you considered adding some social bookmarking links to these blogs. At the very least for twitter.
Hello would you mind letting me know which web host you’re working with? I’ve loaded your blog in 3 different browsers and I must say this blog loads a lot quicker then most. Can you recommend a good internet hosting provider at a reasonable price? Thanks, I appreciate it!
Aw, this was a νery goоd post. Finding the timе and actuаl effort to genеrate a геally gοod article but what can I ѕаy I put thingѕ off а
lot and never seem to get neаrly anything done.
Hey there, I think your website might be having browser compatibility issues. When I look at your website in Firefox, it looks fine but when opening in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping. I just wanted to give you a quick heads up! Other then that, excellent blog!
Almost all of what you articulate happens to be supprisingly precise and it makes me ponder why I had not looked at this in this light previously. This particular article really did switch the light on for me personally as far as this subject goes. Nonetheless there is actually just one issue I am not really too cozy with so whilst I make an effort to reconcile that with the central theme of the position, permit me observe just what all the rest of your visitors have to point out.Very well done.
Awesome blog! Do you have any tips and hints for aspiring writers? I’m hoping to start my own website soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you suggest starting with a free platform like Wordpress or go for a paid option? There are so many options out there that I’m totally confused .. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Hey there! http://www.unc.edu/~payst/?p=73 is exactly what I’m trying to find. I’m attempting to arrange it now, but not able that will. How would I present all popular topics? If you could spell it out I’d really be thankful. Please do respond! I’ve been looking and last and last to find your blog. Thanks so much, Tim Piotrowski!
Hmm it looks like your site ate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I wrote and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I too am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing. Do you have any tips and hints for first-time blog writers? I’d definitely appreciate it.
I similar to the beneficial details you give you inside of your content articles.I will bookmark your weblog and look at once again listed here consistently.I’m relatively sure I’ll learn an awful lot of new things best below! Really good luck with the up coming!
It’s a shame you don’t have a donate button! I’d definitely donate to this brilliant blog! I suppose for now i’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to fresh updates and will share this site with my Facebook group. Talk soon!
great content. hope you will write more…
I really like your blog.. very nice colors & theme. Did you make this website yourself or did you hire someone to do it for you? Plz reply as I’m looking to create my own blog and would like to find out where u got this from. kudos