[BBLISA] Emergency Pagers

[Dave Pascoe]

I don't know about carriers other than Verizon and AT&T, but in general
the email-to-SMS gateways have no SLA and are treated as consumer
products.  So you can't really depend on them.  On the other hand,
paging is a rapidly consolidating and diminishing business, so I
wouldn't depend on those being around forever or even as reliable as
they are now, at some point in the future.

AT&T:
@txt.att.net is AT&T's consumer class product, no SLA.  AT&T
also offers an enterprise class service @page.att.net, that comes with
an SLA.  They also offer an MMS service, if the typical SMS message size
is too small for your needs.  I use the @page.att.net service (I believe
it is an extra $5/month) and have found it more reliable and seems to
have lower latency than the @txt.att.net service.  No idea whether there
is better/different infrastructure that gives them the guts to provide
an SLA, or whether things are better monitored.  I suspect the platform
is the same, based on bits of information I've been exposed to.

Verizon:
When I was a Verizon customer I had no major issues with them.  And
remember, many times SMS messages will make it through where you can't
even make a voice call.  Sometimes the opposite.  Many variables
involved.  But generally Verizon was pretty good.

I guess it all boils down to how mission critical it is that you be
paged *right now*.

HTH,
Dave


On 3/17/10 3:39 PM, Brian O'Neill wrote:
> We still use pagers as well (USA Mobility or whatever they are called 
> this week). I think we'd love to drop them, but we've still found SMS to 
> be unreliable in terms of speed of delivery. Sometimes we'll still get 
> the SMS hours later, and not for want of signal (the phone can have full 
> signal, and not be moving for hours, and the message will come at 3am 
> when it was sent at 6pm...)
> 
> I've been trying to talk the guy who pays for the cell phones to get me 
> a Droid to see about a way to poll for critical messages from multiple 
> sources...