North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Postmaster @ vtext.com (or what are best practice to send SMS these days)

  • From: David Coulson
  • Date: Wed Apr 16 15:26:34 2008

In my experience, even with TAP, sending messages to a cell phone is spotty at best. I have folks on both uni-directional pagers via TAP or SNPP, as well as cell phones via e-mail and TAP. There isn't a noticeable difference in delivery time between e-mail and TAP on the phones.

Cell to Cell is probably the best option if you want to stick with SMS to cell phones. I have no idea how reliable it is between carriers. I still get some comfort knowing that people have pagers with a TAP gateway - I've no idea how the technology differs between a pager and SMS, but it seems much more reliable. All of the pager problems I've had in the last few years have been, erm, 'payment related'.

David Ulevitch wrote:

We've noticed that [email protected] is no longer a very reliable form of delivery for alerts from Nagios, et al. It seems as our volume of alerts has risen, our delivery rate has dropped precipitously.

We don't expect much trying to actually reach a postmaster for vtext.com so I thought the better question would be to ask what the current best practice is to get SMS alerts out?

Back in the day, I remember a company I worked for had something called a TAP gateway. Is that still a good route? I've also been told to check out an SMS gateway/api service called clickatell.com -- anyone using them to delivering timely notifications?

Is the best thing to do to try and get a programmable cellphone in a
datacenter?

What else are operators doing to get the pages out when things go wonky?

-David