The arse with SMS home routing
Lately quite a few people have been talking to me about sms home routing. Most people from the industry have been, not to put too fine a point on it, seething with annoyance at the prospect.
‘Home routing’ means (thanks to Wikipedia) ‘that the receiving mobile operator assumes responsibility for the delivery of an SMS, rather than the sending mobile operator.’
That might, at first glance, sound sensible. But I’m not so sure.
Right now the sending operator takes responsibility for delivering its own text messages.
That is, if I, using T-Mobile, send a text to Ed at ROKTalk who’s using Vodafone, my message is queued by T-Mobile who, via their interconnect, communicate with Vodafone’s user directory. (OK so I’m massively simplifying things) They explain they’ve got a message waiting for one of Vodafone’s customers. Vodafone’s user directory receive the request and ask T-Mobile to hold on just a moment whilst they hunt around for the handset on their network. If they find the handset Vodafone informs T-Mobile about the delivery parameters, and then T-Mobile delivers the SMS straight to the Vodafone handset. Then T-Mobile gets a delivery receipt again straight from the handset.
Or, if the message can’t be delivered, it’s [held by T-Mobile for future delivery?] until it can be. All is good. Right? I know what I’m paying for. T-Mobile know what they’re charging me for. All is good.
The KEY point is that T-Mobile — the people I’m paying good money to, for the transmission of that text message — are sitting waiting to deliver my message. They take responsibility for it. It’s their problem.
Home routing, on the other hand, works in this way: T-Mobile pass the message to Vodafone. Vodafone say thanks. We move on. T-Mobile don’t have to bother at all with any responsibility. It’s completely Vodafone’s problem to deliver the message. T-Mobile add the transmission costs to my bill and that’s it. Sounds OK, right? But no. The problem I’ve got here is that I’m NOT paying T-Mobile to send messages to Vodafone, I’m paying T-Mobile to send messages to the Vodafone customer — Ed, for example. I want them to take FULL responsibility for the message delivery.
This is the equivalent of paying UPS to send a package to India — where a nice man in a UPS van and uniform comes to pick up the package, chucks it in the back of the van, arrives at the depot and gives it to some guy on a push bike and asks him to ‘sort it out’.
Cue: A guy in a push bike cycling all the way to India with my package.
No. I want UPS to deliver the package end-to-end. In fancy UPS jumbo jets and trucks. Ok, A warped example, I know. I’m just not keen on the concept of the mobile networks doing the fake smile at each other (“Sure, that message, sure of course, yeah! We delivered it. No, honest. It’s not arrived? Ah, well that’s strange, honest we sent it, guv…”)
Right now T-Mobile know if my message has been delivered. And they bill me accordingly. Introduced home routing and T-Mobile won’t have a clue other if my message has arrived. They’ll still bill me, obviously, because Vodafone says they delivered the message…
The lack of transparency really bothers me. Particularly since we’ve only JUST got text messaging to the point where it’s more or less reliable for consumers to use.
The issue? Well, rumours — and they’re only rumours at the moment — indicate that many mobile operators in the UK and beyond are considering swapping to home routing.
Have you got a perspective? I’m going to look at this in a bit more depth over the next few weeks.
