Is SMS good enough for business?

SMS is not a guaranteed system.

Texts sent on a mobile phone do not always get through and sometimes arrive more than once or in the wrong order. Is that reliable enough for business messages? Surprisingly, the answer is yes in many environments.

Texts sent through a business texting service or a web-based SMS gateway go straight into the core network, instead of competing for bandwidth on the local cell mast along with all the other texts, data traffic and voice calls. A gateway can track whether a text has been sent or not and can retry automatically, something your mobile usually cannot do.

Beware services that send via overseas networks. Charges may be lower but messages are more likely to become lost between networks, or be blocked for being spam or simply because they do not have an SMS peering deal with the UK networks.

Sometimes the SMS network is strained. Elaine Roberts, head of enterprise voice and messaging at Vodafone, says that on New Year’s Eve 27 million texts are sent instead of the usual 20 million, and most of those are usually in a 16-minute window between 11.59pm and 12.15am. As SMS makes a different connection to the cell, it does not run into problems just because the voice network is congested. A typical urban mobile cell takes 14 voice calls at once, but it can also be handling 120 text messages a second.

Avanquest managing director Chris Thompson finds that even major interruptions to the mobile phone networks, such as the problems experienced after the London bombings in July, does not mean texts get lost, as such problems are localised rather than consuming the whole network.

‘The mobile services did go down, but it was only in London and it was only for a short time. Messages that were queued to be sent did get sent later, they didn’t get lost,’ he says.

Airline Britannia Airways, along with airport operator BAA, used SMS to contact its crisis response teams and to check on staff after the 7 July London bombings, as did many other businesses.