reliability
Posted by SaferMobile on May 18, 2011
One of the main goals of the SaferMobile project is to release software tools that allow activists and rights defenders to use their mobile phones as network monitors and sensors. The goal is to help them, and the mobile developers, human rights organizations and people on the street they work with, to monitor network performance and proactively detect blocking, filtering and censorship. SMSTester is the first tool we are publicly releasing within this category, and it is free, freely licensed and open-source. Our first trial run with Short Message Service Tester (SMSTester) was completed in April 2011. The results are written up here.
Posted by KatrinVerclas on Mar 09, 2011
This is a guest post by our colleague Michael Benedict who is currently working in Tanzania and Uganda. It was originally posted on his blog and is published here with permission.
While working with SMS-based applications I’ve noticed an air of mystery around the issue of reliability. I hear colleagues say ambiguous things like “carriers consider SMS to be lower priority than voice”, or “SMS delivery isn’t guarant
eed”. My personal experience has been that messages are almost always delivered quickly and correctly, but I’ve heard stories of hours-long delays, corruption of data, and occasionally messages that never arrive. Since I am working on two projects that depend on reliable SMS service — one involves field-based data collection and another employs SMS as a transport layer between computers — I am interested in learning about how factors such as network, location, and time of day impact message transmission. I found myself in Mwanza, Tanzania last week with two GPRS modems and a local partner who was distinctly unenthusiastic about the work I was there to do, so I decided to try an experiment. I bought SIM cards and airtime for three of the major TZ networks, put two at a time in the models, and wrote a simple python script using Adam Mckaig’s excellent pygsm
| Monitoring SMS Delivery Reliability data sheet 3794 Views |
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Tanzania
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Posted by LeighJaschke on Jul 13, 2009
Characterizing the Limitations of Third-Party EAS Over Cellular Text Messaging Services data sheet 2257 Views
Abstract:
In this paper, the researchers demonstrate the limitations of third party Emergency Alert
Systems (EAS). In particular, because of the architecture of cellular networks, such
systems will not be able to deliver a high volume of emergency messages in a
short period of time. Through discussion, modeling and simulation, this research shows that
current systems not only can not widely disseminate such messages quickly, but
also that the addition traffic created by third party EAS may disrupt other traffic
such as voice communications, including that of emergency responders or the
public to 9-1-1 services.
