T-Mobile and Vodafone race to deliver World Cup alerts

Link: T-Mobile and Vodafone Prove to Lead to Pack on SMS World Cup Delivery.

Two companies at the forefront of this contest are T-Mobile and Vodafone. As England beat Ecuador on Sunday, the two operators delivered their SMS alerts of Beckham’s winning goal within one minute of his free kick strike. The move by T-Mobile and Vodafone proved to be the fastest performance of the whole tournament.

A minute is pretty good if you allow for a few seconds to write the text, confirm it’s ok and then whack it out to the network for delivery. Nice work!

The article goes on to highlight the fact that one of the five operators took 10 minutes to deliver the update… which, when you’re invariably paying for the service, just isn’t good enough.

Despite the fast results delivered by T-Mobile and Vodafone on Sunday, consumers are demanding still more. Argogroup conducted a poll last Friday, randomly selecting 50 mobile phone users and inquiring as to the acceptable SMS delivery time for something like the World Cup. More than 60 percent responded that 30 seconds would be considered acceptable.

This is particularly interesting. Here I am saying ‘I reckon a minute is pretty good’ — I can very well believe this statistic from Argogroup. 30 seconds is quite late isn’t it… if you’re busy working away and can’t watch TV or listen to the radio, you want to know right-away if there’s a goal scored.

I’m never one to resist an MMS-bashing opportunity:

The same consumer group was asked about multimedia messaging service (MMS) and a similar percentage did not know what MMS was.

Tons more interesting points on the article.

(Good marketing for Argogroup too)